The Tables Are Turning On Obamacare

Alan: Since Republicans have no positive legislative agenda, preferring instead to repeal (or fail to fund) every piece of progressive legislation from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Barack Obama, I will argue - adamantly - that contemporary "conservatives" fit the (accurate) definition of evil as "taking pleasure in deliberate destruction." Except for arguments like: "A flat earth is just another opinion concerning the planet's shape," there is not now - nor has there ever been - any good reason to oppose Obamacare unless it is good to argue that one must "pay to play," or alternatively "get sick, stay sick, die young."

"Obamacare And The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/obamacare-and-hard-central-fact-of.html

***

Notice what's wrong with this lede from the AP's Donna Cassata?

President Barack Obama's unpopular health care law is losing some of its political punch as vulnerable Democrats see it as less of an election-year minus and Republicans increasingly talk about fixing it instead of repealing.

To be fair to Cassata, the rest of the article is actually pretty informative, but what's happening here isn't just that Democrats are seeing Obamacare as "less of an election-year minus"—it's that now that Obamacare is delivering tangible results, Democrats are seeing it as an election-year plus. As one of Cassata's sources says:

"Democrats like this bill," [Harvard School of Public Health public opinion analysts Robert] Blendon said. "There's a big mistake that nobody likes this bill. They really like it lot and there are features of it that are incredibly popular with Democrats or more moderate independents."

That's why we're seeing Sen. Mark Pryor run an ad in Arkansas touting the bill's ban on denying coverage due to preexisting conditions, and that's why we're seeing Kentucky Democratic Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes go after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for wanting to toss repeal coverage for hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians.It's been a long time coming, but now the election less than three months away, health care reform is no longer an issue for Democrats to neutralize—it's something are turning into an advantage. When Obamacare was nothing more than a bunch of pieces of paper, it served as an easy proxy for Republicans to accuse Democrats in red states of being rubber-stamps for President Obama, but now that it's delivering tangible benefits, the tables are turned. GOP attacks which once resonated can be countered with the reality of what the Affordable Care Act is delivering—and what it would mean if Republicans got what they wanted and took it all away. That's much more than Obamacare becoming less of a minus—that's Obamacare becoming an asset.