Can Democrats avoid a circular firing squad on Obamacare? The early signs aren’t promising.
Friday’s vote on a Republican plan that would allow people who liked their insurance to keep it drew more than three dozen Democratic defections, the vast majority of whom sit in districts that will be targeted by Republicans in 2014. Meanwhile, in the Senate, a handful of the most vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2014 — Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu is leading the charge — were working on a similar effort.
All of that movement came within hours of a Thursday news conference by President Obama that was clearly aimed at calming the building political storm, particularly within his own party. Obama and his team had clearly hoped that allowing people to keep their insurance plans through 2014 if they so chose would keep Democratic defections on the “Keep Your Health Plan Act” in the House to a minimum and end — or at least sap political energy from — efforts by Democratic senators to amend the law. It did neither.
And, in the aftermath of the House vote, leading Democrats acknowledged that it was primarily politics that led to the large number of Democrats breaking with the president. ”The fact of the matter is about 30 of them, and I’ve talked to them, were insulating themselves against sound bites,” said Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn (S.C.) during an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Inherent in Clyburn’s statement is the fact that for Democrats in swing districts — and, by extension, swing states — Obamacare is a losing issue from which, for political reasons, they need to distance themselves. That mindset leads to a slippery political slope for congressional Democrats and the White House. If the politically “safe” vote for vulnerable Democrats becomes voting against the president on his health-care law, it raises the real possibility that Congress could wage serious efforts to unravel parts of the law. And if the law starts to collapse under its own weight, it’s difficult to see that being a good thing — or even a neutral thing — for Democrats at the ballot box in 2014.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/11/18/can-democrats-avoid-a-circular-firing-squad-on-obamacare-the-early-signs-arent-promising/
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