Pollster Celinda Lake's advice to fellow Democrats to take a midway position in the 2014 congressional campaigns is flawed because it can't be sold as honest.
Reacting to results from her bipartisan Battleground Poll that show Obamacare to be a political loser, Lake said: "Don't defend it. Say it was flawed from the beginning and we're going to fix it."
Note that she didn't advise to reject it outright, apparently because she knows that's never going to fly with Obama and the Democratic establishment and probably because it would be tantamount to an admission that the party has failed in its central policy "achievement."
But her advice to adopt a middle-of-the-road position is not much different. To say the law was flawed from the beginning is a damning admission, especially considering how inflexible the Democrats were when they crammed this albatross through Congress.
I just read a story reminding us that Democrats had a chance to try a more moderate approach in 2009, when then-Sen. Max Baucus warned that Democrats "could ram through a health care overhaul on a partisan vote" but "wouldn't be able to sustain it." But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended up scuttling Baucus' attempt to scale back the bill. So Democrats had a chance to moderate it, but they went full-bore defiance and stuffed it down our throats.
How is it going to play now if they say the following? "We see now the error of our ways; we shouldn't have been so extreme. Give us another chance, because we only want to help you."
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The inescapable fact is that Democrats have supported this law the whole way, to the detriment of millions of Americans and to the impending destruction of our health care system. Democratic candidates can opportunistically pretend they'll buck the party to fix this system, but modern history shows they march in lock step with their leftist leadership. Compromise and moderation are not in their vocabulary.
Another major problem with Lake's advice is that the law is fundamentally flawed. It is not fixable. By design, it took over the entire health care system. You can't improve it with incremental changes. It has to be eradicated before it does irreversible damage.
Notice that Lake, like all good Democrats, will never acknowledge that the concept was ill-conceived, for "good intentions" will always be the Democrats' preferred currency, their last line of defense.
Lake insists that it was a good idea in principle because it envisioned that the government would protect people from the evil insurance companies. Those weren't her precise words. What she said was that Democrats should stick to their historical approach of looking out for the little guy when it comes to health care. "We're not going to go back to the days of leaving you on your own with the insurance companies." But didn't the Congressional Budget Office recently estimate that some 31 million little guys will remain uninsured 10 years from now, after Obamacare is fully implemented?
Just listen to the patronizing. I'm not sure which is worse, Lake's statement that people need the caretaking federal government to protect them from presumptively evil insurance companies or Reid's statement that Obama's most recent Obamacare extension is only necessary because people don't know how to use the Internet. The irony is that if Democrats stay in effective control of our government much longer, they'll make sure that people are completely dependent on government -- meaning on them.
But Reid is lying, too. This is the 28th Obamacare delay, and most of them had nothing even arguably to do with the Internet. Besides, if people want to get their health insurance information filed, they can mail it in.
Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is also lying. She lied to Congress that the March 31 deadline would not be extended, and now that it has been, she's denying it's an extension. It's analogous to keeping the polls open for voters who are already in line, she says. Oh, really, for weeks? If that's true, why is she trying to get more people to join the line? The sad fact for these charlatans is that some 50 percent of people say they have no intention of signing up even with the extended deadline.
The worst lie of all stems from the fact that all these extensions are a mirage. They are not to help people but to mask just how terrible this law really is and delay the full pain until after the November elections. Obama's disapproval numbers are at an all-time high -- 59 percent -- and Democrats know he's going to drag down their candidates, so they have to mitigate the damage.
With all due respect, Ms. Lake, the Democrats are not looking out for the little guy or the middle-class guy or the big evil rich guy. They are looking out for themselves, and unless Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, they are going to be in serious trouble in November. Obamacare is a fitting noose around their necks.
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