Debacle: How ObamaCare killed the Democrats

In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government…

Pushing ObamaCare was an astonishing misjudgment, the domestic policy equivalent of President Bush launching a full-scale preemptive strike against Iran after embroiling the country in Iraq and Afghanistan. But why don’t progressives get that this is terrible economic timing? Because this is the moment they have been waiting for since Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare. Never mind that the economy then, unlike now, was booming. What matters is they have in the White House as sympathetic a president as they can ever hope to get–combined with sizable margins of Democrats in both chambers. Republicans, moreover, have been thoroughly discredited on both foreign and domestic policy having presided over two unpopular wars and a financial meltdown of epic proportions. In short, the political stars have never been–and likely never will be–aligned more auspiciously in the progressives’ lifetime, and they will be damned if they’ll allow quotidian worries about the economy or anything else to stop them. It is now or never…

But the rub is that even if ObamaCare passes, Democrats and President Obama will lose. Republicans have already vowed to make November a referendum on this bill and, by all auguries, Democrats are going to lose big time. The loss of one election if the larger cause succeeds wouldn’t be a big deal. But this bill has little legitimacy and for years might be tied up in constitutional challenges against its individual mandate provision–not to mention the provisions that turn insurance companies into public utilities without due process. ObamaCare could well become President Obama’s Iraq. Worst of all from the standpoint of his personal life story, it will exacerbate the crisis of the entitlement state, requiring someone else to step forward and clean up the fiscal mess he is creating.