It may be an odd thing to say following an election in which Democrats suffered a broad and humiliating defeat, but Republicans could learn a lot from President Obama and his party about how to advance an agenda.
When Obama entered office in 2009 with massive majorities in the House and Senate, many political analysts argued that he should focus on the economy, and shelve the liberal policy goals for a later date.
But Obama recognized that passing a national healthcare law would be a major advance for liberalism – a policy victory that had eluded the movement for decades – arguably. a century. Just as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have endured, Obama figured that once he got a new entitlement on the books, it would be impossible to take away.
That’s why he persevered in the face of a massive popular backlash and the loss of a Senate seat in the deep blue state of Massachusetts.
In political terms, his critics were undeniably right. When Obama entered office, Democrats held 257 House seats. By the time all the votes are counted in the races yet to be decided, that will be down to around 185. On the Senate side, Obamacare famously passed exclusively with Democratic votes – 60 of them. By the time all the Senate races are decided, it’s likely that Republicans will hold the seats previously held by 17 Democrats who voted for Obamacare.
And even this understates the massacre that occurred on Tuesday – with Republicans capturing the governors’ mansions in liberal strongholds of Massachusetts, Maryland and even Obama’s home state of Illinois.
Despite all of this, however, Obamacare remains on the books with the second year of open enrollment beginning on Nov. 15. And Obama’s veto pen can be expected to keep his signature legislative accomplishment safe until at least 2017.
In other words, Obama — with the help of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., — was willing to sacrifice the political fortunes of the Democratic Party in order to achieve a major liberal policy goal.
This isn’t the type of behavior one typically sees from Republicans. Most conservatives would, in a second, take a deal under which Republicans enacted major entitlement reforms and dismantled government programs, but ended up suffering at the polls at the result.
Instead, conservatives typically get Republican leadership that’s too timid and worried about the next election.
The last time Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, President Bush expanded the federal role in education and rammed through what was at the time the largest expansion of federal entitlements since the Great Society in the form of the Medicare prescription drug plan.
For all the mockery of their incompetence, the insight that Pelosi, Reid and Obama had was that political power is fleeting, and that sometimes it’s worth taking a political hit to advance an agenda.
If Republicans behave like they typically do, the newly-minted Senate majority will pursue the path of least resistance, and even if they get the presidency, they’ll argue that Obamacare is too entrenched to uproot. The lesson they’ll take from the Obama era is that his mistake was that he overreached politically, and thus they shouldn’t overreach in the opposite direction.
In that case, Obama will have won a permanent policy victory in exchange for short-term political defeats.
If Republicans take the better lesson, they’ll be willing to repeal Obamacare, to advance real free market healthcare reforms, to overhaul the nation’s broken entitlement system, and be willing to endure whatever political backlash results.
Put another way, imitating Obama is the only way to kill Obamacare.
