On Wednesday, in a
47-51 party line vote — with
Senators Lieberman (CT) and Warner (VA) not voting — Senate
Republicans followed their House colleagues in coming through with
their promise to get a vote on repealing Obamacare.
Despite the rhetoric of the left, the vote was far more
than symbolic as it forced some key vulnerable Democrats, including
Claire McCaskill (MO) and Ben Nelson (NE), to show whether they
stood with the citizens of their states or with the arm-twisting of
Harry Reid and Barack Obama. In a vote in August, 71% of those
Missourians who cast ballots
voted to prohibit the government from requiring that a person
purchase health insurance, the lynchpin of
Obamacare’s takeover of the American health insurance system.
McCaskill gave those 71% of voters the finger and, I predict,
sealed her fate in the 2012 elections, as did Ben Nelson whose
state is
2-to-1 against Obamacare.
“Conservative” Democrat Joe Manchin (WV) also voted with
the Democrats to preserve Obamacare, proving right his Republican
challenger in the 2010 Senate race who said that
Manchin’s late-in-the-race conversion to being against
Obamacare was a lie and that his earlier
support of Obamacare represented who Manchin really is. A
Rasmussen Reports poll of West Virginia likely
voters in August, 2010 showed 69% of the state
opposed to Obamacare, with 80% of those “strongly opposed” and
almost twice as many supporting the state suing to block the law’s
health insurance mandate as opposing such a lawsuit. &%^$! the
people, says Manchin!
In addition to hurting his own re-election chances (he’s
up in 2012 because his election was to fill Robert Byrd’s unexpired
term), it’s also good ammunition for Republicans to use against
every Democrat in 2012. Arguments along the lines of “see, you
can’t trust a word they say” and “they don’t care what you want,
only what Harry Reid wants” won’t help Democrats retain their 23
current Senate seats up for grabs in the next election.
Democrats seem to believe that the 2010 elections were not
about Obamacare — and, by extension, that the 2012 elections won’t
be either. Although it wasn’t the only issue — government spending
is also top-of-mind for many voters, even more so now than going
into the last elections — it was a critical issue; Democrats are
making a huge error in thinking that repeal of Obamacare is just
something Republicans need to “get out of
their system really quickly,” as Harry Reid
put it.
THE RESULTS OF WEDNESDAY’s vote were not surprising, even
if many of us thought there was a chance that one or two Democrats
might vote for repeal just to save their own electoral hides. What
also isn’t surprising is the rhetoric from the left and its tools
in the press, as exemplified by Washington Post writer
Stephen Stromberg who asks, “Did Republicans
overpromise on health bill
repeal?”
Right on cue, here’s what passes for analysis from the
Post: “House
Speaker John Boehner didn’t exactly
guarantee outright repeal in November, but he and others in his
party came pretty close.” Let me summarize for you, Stephen:
Neither Boehner nor others guaranteed repeal. You know what they
say about “close,” and in what situations it counts.
Perhaps compared to his fellow travelers at Reuters, whose
article Stromberg links to, he is a model of accuracy. After all,
Reuters’ headline was “Boehner
vows to repeal Obama healthcare reforms”
even while the quote from Boehner says “we have to do everything we
can to try [emphasis mine] to repeal this
bill and replace it…” And by the way, Stephen, Boehner did get
the repeal vote through the House — with the support of several
Democrats and without losing a single Republican.
Stromberg’s assessment that Republicans could be erring by
“setting expectations high” shows a complete lack of understanding
of the impact of the votes. As
Jim DeMint (R-SC) put it earlier this
week, “Well, we need to get everyone on
record so Americans and the voters in 2012 will know where their
senators stand on it.” And now we know.
And as if Stromberg hadn’t already displayed enough
cluelessness, he closes his article with this:
It could be easy enough to blame everything on Obama and the
Democratic Senate. Anti-Obama animus could well buoy the movement
into 2012. And conservatives are usually more understanding than
liberals when their politicians don’t follow through as
spectacularly as they’d hoped.
Again, Mr. Stromberg, let me make this simple for you: First, it
will be easy to blame Obama and the Democratic Senate because given
the issues that Americans are focused on now, it’s extremely likely
that a lack of progress will be their fault. Second, the animus is
against the health care takeover and the reprehensible process by
which it was shoved down our throats; it is not specifically
anti-Obama, as shown by his personal approval ratings being much
higher than Congress’ ratings or Obamacare’s ratings. And third,
conservative politicians have — perhaps for the first time in a
generation — something to be proud of. They didn’t promise to
repeal Obamacare, but they promised to try. And they’ll keep doing
everything they can to weaken and defeat the unconstitutional law
— as promised — with each and every successful hack at Obamacare
representing a small but spectacular success.
There’s one way in which Republicans, including
particularly the usual suspect, Lindsey Graham (SC), may be
responsible for the GOP’s not getting one Democrat vote: Graham,
along with Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, offered a
well-intentioned but badly timed measure to allow a state opt-out
from Obamacare, giving those Democrats wiggle-room to claim they’re
going to support “making it better,” along the lines of President
Obama’s insincere plea during his State of the Union Address: “If
you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better
or more affordable, I am eager to work with you.”
As usual, Graham’s fellow South Carolinian, Senator
DeMint, had it right when he said, “But the thing I don’t want to
do right now is to go in try and fix (Obamacare)… to
go back and try to fix pieces of it, recognizing that it’s built on
a government foundation, a foundation of government health care, we
don’t want to fix pieces of it. What we want to do is repeal the
whole thing, and then step by step improve the system we have now,
which is the best health care system in the world. And so we’re not
only trying to protect our health care system but our way of life,
and hopefully, constitutional limits when this whole thing is
over.”
Despite Graham’s in-character unwitting usefulness to the
left, it remains unlikely that Harry Reid would have allowed more
than one or two Democrats to vote for repeal. The modicum of cover
that Graham and Barrasso gave those Democrats was unnecessary an
won’t keep the other shoe from dropping on Senate Dems in
2012.
If you want to understand the implication of the
Republican assault on Obamacare (and of the Democrats’ defense of
it), don’t bother with the lamestream media. Instead, look
at
betting on 2012 Senate control. It’s
trading around 70% for the Republicans to win back control, the
all-time high for that bet and up 15% from the November
elections.
