The GOP's "Obamacare Trap"

Greg Sargent has a good overview of the GOP's potential "Obamacare Trap," which would spring and snap shut should the law accrue in popularity while Republican pols are still base-required to vilify it.  

Writes Sargent, "to at a certain point, Obamacare may simply fade from the headlines" as its problems are resolved and its workability becomes increasingly apparent. "Since the demand for total repeal is the basis for the GOP’s entire 2014 strategy," continues Sargent, "it’s unclear what would happen then."

Permit me an educated guess. Democrats would fail to hammer Republicans for their characteristic lack of vision, their unthinking opposition to all progress, and their slithering hostility to the benefits of government, even when those benefits are, as mentioned, increasingly apparent.

I say this for one simple, empirical reason. When House Republicans voted to essentially kill Medicare, most observers thought they had just cut their own throats; yet Democrats tended to battle whatever was next up on the Republican-driven agenda, rather than refocusing the headlines back to that one GOP vote.  

In other words, what would likely happen is that Obamacare would indeed simply fade from the headlines, just as the Medicare vote did.

  

Comments

[Peter G]

That is exactly what is going to happen. People notice when government fails. They almost never notice when it doesn't.

[Turgidson]

I actually thought the Dems did somewhat better than usual in pinning the Ryan budget on the GOP. Problem was, the Ryan budget only became a public issue immediately AFTER the GOP had dominated 2010 running in part as the saviors of Medicare from that boy Obama and his soshulism and almost 2 years before the next elections. So the Dems won some news cycles on it in the first few months of 2011. Then they kinda won some more when Ryan was tapped for VP, but by then he had backed off his Medicare destruction plans somewhat and the Romney campaign had spent the past 8 months hyping the lie that Obama raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare - muddying the waters sufficiently that low info voters weren't sure what was going on.

I agree that the Dems sort of let the issue drop eventually, but the Ryan budget was a different challenge in this respect because it wasn't an actual law being introduced - thus, there weren't events happening in real time to discredit it after the point-and-laugh phase was over. So the Dems would have had trouble keeping that story alive indefinitely in any event.

Obamacare won't fade from the headlines because it is a real law that is unfolding as we speak, plus the GOP is utterly deranged in their determination to kill the law and their certitude that the law has already crashed and burned. I mean, they're periodically (and ineffectually) screaming about Benghazi over a year later, and that's nothing to them compared to Obamacare.