Two years after the signing of ObamaCare by Barack Obama, it might be a little difficult to recall how political strategists in the Democratic Party predicted it would impact their party’s fortunes. Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown walks through five assumptions publicly offered about the politics of the ObamaCare push that turned out to be, well … as accurate as its fiscal projections (via Jim Geraghty):
President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies thought their political assumptions were airtight during the yearlong battle to overhaul the health care system.
Voters would reward them, they thought, even if Democrats muscled a bill through without Republican support. It was just a matter of getting out of Washington and selling the law. Obama would lead the charge, and rank-and-file Democrats would proudly campaign on the achievement.
None of it worked out that way.
At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the cost of those miscalculations has been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.
In large part, these political strategists told themselves what they wanted to hear, in the hopes that wish fulfillment would follow. By the summer of 2009, the political trajectory of ObamaCare was evident, as angry voters flooded townhall meetings held by Democrats in Congress to express their disgust over the government takeover of health care. Rather than listen, Congressional Democrats simply stopped holding townhalls altogether to avoid the feedback, while claiming that the protests were just “Astroturf” on behalf of insurance companies — another assumption that proved false in the midterm elections.
Obama: “This was not my plan, per se”
“A haughty spirit comes before the fall”!