McConnell’s Anti-Obamacare Juggernaut Turns Against Him
McConnell’s Anti-Obamacare Juggernaut Turns Against Him
Sahil Kapur September 6, 2013, 7:00 AM
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The Kentuckian is now fending off a strong conservative challenger for re-election in 2014 — his first since Obamacare became law. The candidate, Louisville businessman Matt Bevin, is calling on McConnell to back up his fiery rhetoric against Obamacare by threatening to shut down the government at the end of this month unless Democrats agree to defund it. McConnell knows that strategy is doomed to fail and would imperil the GOP’s hopes of winning the Senate majority. “Shutting down the government,” he explained, “won’t stop Obamacare.”
But Bevin has the backing of conservatives who are deeply committed to destroying Obamacare ahead of its Jan. 1 rollout and are demanding McConnell’s fealty. It defies logic to them that Republicans aren’t willing to temporarily shut down national parks and museums in an effort to thwart a law they insist is so destructive to the fabric of American society. “I truly believe he would blink on this,” Bevin said Thursday on MSNBC, insisting that Obama would be willing to neuter his own signature achievement. “I really do.”
As punishment for resisting their Obamacare shutdown push, conservatives have likened McConnell to a “chicken”; they’ve released web videos attacking him for failing to lead; they’ve argued that he “owns” Obamacare if he allows it to be funded. On Thursday the Senate Conservatives Fund, after launching a statewide campaign to make him “feel the heat” on Obamacare, announced a TV ad buy worth $340,000 attacking him.
“McConnell is the Senate Republican leader but he refuses to lead on defunding Obamacare,” a narrator in the ad says. “What good is a leader like that?”
It’s far from clear conservatives will be able to defeat the well-funded incumbent. But if they succeed, McConnell will, in a way, have given life to the creature that brought about his own demise. Obamacare could have been a controversial but bipartisan expansion of the safety net, like Medicare and Social Security — the law was, after all, modeled on conservative ideas constructed by the Heritage Foundation and first implemented by Mitt Romney. The right-wing furor would have been less severe, the GOP less motivated to paint the law as an existential threat to freedom, and the party likelier to make its peace with it. But the GOP leader’s big gamble to co-opt the nascent tea party movement precluded that scenario. And as a result, the health care law has become an existential threat to his career.
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