Precriminations started in coming in early, as the “Pass. The. Damn. Bill.” crowd started making excuses, in an effort to point fingers in other directions, and redirect blame when it came.
How were they to know that when people screamed that they hated the bill they, you know, hated it? How were they to know that ignoring Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was not a good option, that the light they saw in the tunnel was the oncoming train?
The passing of health care had nothing to do with the Democrats’ troubles, or the real problem is the economy (which is no way depressed by the health care confusion), or maybe it did hurt, but in an alternative universe it would have been even worse.
“How many seats do the Democrats lose in a world where everything is the same … health care reform passed … but unemployment is 5.5 percent?” Ezra Klein ruminates. “How about a world where unemployment is the same, but health care reform was never attempted,” but President Obama taxed carbon? “My best guess is that Democrats lose 25 fewer seats in the first case, and five more seats in the second … but that’s just my best guess.”
Jonathan Cohn posits another scenario where Obama puts off health care to focus like a laser beam on the economy, screws it up anyhow, and then gets criticized widely for deeply annoying his base.
On the other hand, “It’s just possible that the outcome of this election actually had very little to do with health care. It could have been determined back in February 2009,” when Obama decided on a stimulus package that everyone knew was too small.
Jonathan Chait comes up with three new excuses; first, that the trouble had been preordained: “Midterm elections, huge Congressional majorities spread deep into hostile territory, a presidency that began at the outset of a financial crisis, is a recipe for a wipeout,” he says. Well, he didn’t come in at the start of the crisis, but otherwise that explains FDR’s “wipeout” in the 1934 midterms down to the ground.
Then Chait comes up with a “model” (from where?) explaining that a 40-seat loss would not mean Obama had done something wrong. “It’s worth keeping in mind … a clear sense of what we could expect if the president’s policies and political strategy made no difference,” he tells us. “You need to establish what ‘wrong’ would look like. That’s probably a 50-seat loss.”
In 1982, Ronald Reagan, at 42 percent approval with 10.2 percent unemployment, lost 28 House seats, which was considered a “thumping.” Elsewhere, he said that the real problem afflicting the measure was … malaise in the liberal base.
“ObamaCare touched live cables buried beneath the political roadbed,” wrote Daniel Henninger. It was also a giant “up yours” to the American people, pushed through by tactics that seemed barely legal, coming after three huge electoral setbacks, plummeting poll numbers, and many expressions of rage.
The face of the measure was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., striding across the grounds of the Capitol, with an in-your-face grin and an oversized gavel. Her disapprove/approve ratio with the American people is now 61/8 among independents, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
“The electoral map hardened this spring, after the House passed a health care bill that remains deeply unpopular,” said Politico. “It is unclear whether lawmakers will survive or fall solely based on their support of health care reform,” the Hill said on Saturday. “But polling shows the D’s have lost the message war … on the landmark health law and in tight races, the yes votes could be the deciding factor.”
They were. It did it. Case closed.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
