“We can run on this,” David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief political strategist, said nine months ago as Congress debated Obamacare. On Tuesday, the president’s party appears poised to lose control of the House and to be reduced to dependence on Vice President Joe Biden’s tiebreaking vote to retain vestigial power in the Senate. Axelrod’s advice surely ranks among the worst campaign miscalculations in American political history. And it is indeed difficult to account for an error of such magnitude without thinking that Obama and Axelrod ignored what they surely could see with their own eyes.

The evidence was certainly there for everybody to see early on. A clear majority of Americans expressed doubts about Obamacare in 2009 as soon as they became aware of its central feature: putting government bureaucrats between patients and their doctors. Their doubts solidified into determined opposition during 2009’s long hot summer of tempestuous Town Hall meetings. The opposition grew stronger still as the months ticked by despite repeated “new” efforts by Obama and his allies in Congress and the liberal mainstream media to “sell” Obamacare.