Thursday, July 23, 2009

GOP: Hey, We Can...Win???

For the first time in a long time, the GOP appears to be feeling a bit of genuine confidence:
“When Americans voted for change, it was for a change from the uncertainty and economic unpredictability at the end of the Bush years,” says Alex Castellanos, the Republican message master who helped shape the RNC campaign. “But the president is giving them economic unpredictability on steroids. There is the clear sense out there that he is moving so fast on so many fronts that his health care plan cannot be well thought out.”

...

Republicans believe there’s a real chance Obama will make his own situation worse by pushing too hard. People have heard this sort of thing before. Anyone who’s bought a car, a TV or an insurance policy knows the feeling when a salesman amps up the pressure to close the deal. You need to buy this today, sign the papers right now, don’t wait another minute. When that happens, the smart customer backs off a little: Why is this guy trying to rush me into this?

...

For a long time, it looked as if Republicans were flattened and hopeless while Obama moved from victory to victory. But now, the sense of energy is palpable. The GOP critique of Obama is sharper, its discipline better, its fundraising up — all just seven months after the party got its clock cleaned in both the presidential and congressional elections.

The result of the Obama experiment might not be nationalized health care, but a re-energized Republican Party.

On Fox & Friends, they offered another good talking point: Currently 90% of all Americans are covered by insurance. Obama's vaunted plan will cover, theoretically, another 7%.

So:

We're destroying the entire system to move from 90% to 97% coverage? And that 7%, of course, includes a lot of young people who think they don't need health insurance because they're young and healthy (and, in fact, they're right, according to the statistics; even more right when you consider that each young person is forced to pay way too much for health care, as he subsidizes older customers).

Hey, what a great idea, huh? But this is an even more interesting twist:

And You Guys Thought That Obama's Utter Lack of Executive -- or Even Real Job-Type Job -- Experience Would Be a Problem: Democrats "baffled" as Obama votes present on pretty much every key detail of that health care plan he tells us it's time to start talking about and just pass.

Even though it's not written. Even though the basic parameters of it haven't been agreed to.

As the prospects for passing health reform by the time Congress leaves for its August recess look bleaker, Democratic grumbling about President Obama is growing louder. One Democratic senator tells CNN congressional Democrats are “baffled,” and another senior Democratic source tells CNN members of the president’s own party are still “frustrated” that they’re not getting more specific direction from him on health care. “We appreciate the rhetoric and his willingness to ratchet up the pressure but what most Democrats on the Hill are looking for is for the president to weigh in and make decisions on outstanding issues. Instead of sending out his people and saying the president isn’t ruling anything out, members would like a little bit of clarity on what he would support – especially on how to pay for his health reform bill,” a senior Democratic congressional source tells CNN.
Huh. How about that!

Thus...the GOP can win. If they do the right things, like hammering away at Obamacare. I think this is a great salvo:



Another good idea would be to hammer on this:

Like I told you the other day: It’s all about the O. Isn’t it always?

Grassley said he spoke with a Democratic House member last week who shared Obama’s bleak reaction during a private meeting to reports that some factions of House Democrats were lining up to stall or even take down the overhaul unless leaders made major changes.

“Let’s just lay everything on the table,” Grassley said. “A Democrat congressman last week told me after a conversation with the president that the president had trouble in the House of Representatives, and it wasn’t going to pass if there weren’t some changes made … and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’”

Consider this a complete vindication of DeMint’s point, which Obama pretended to take such offense at, that if the GOP defeats ObamaCare “it will be his Waterloo, it will break him…” Evidently The One couldn’t agree more, and with good reason. If he can’t deliver on his centerpiece policy goal with bulletproof majorities in Congress, not only will it haunt him in 2012 but he’ll have to reconsider the public’s appetite for the whole Hopenchange/Great Society agenda. Failure wouldn’t destroy his presidency so much as it would destroy his presidency as he imagined it; he’d have to remake himself as a sort of Clintonian centrist and become the “pragmatist” all those thoughtful conservatives like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley promised us he’d be before he was sworn in and started pushing 13-digit deficits.

Here’s Krauthammer from last night’s “Special Report” explaining the stakes and why, in the end, Obama will swallow whatever watered-down crap Congress hands him. Hint: It’s all about the O.

Uh...I vote we give him nothing. To paraphrase when Ronald Reagan addressed the last major push by avowed statists to destroy America: we win, they lose.

There's my two cents.

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