The DemCare Terminator And Election Predictions

You know how the Terminator is a scary, skeletal, indestructible mechanism of death that just...won't...die...! DemCare is apparently the same:

President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate leader Harry Reid have all agreed to the basic framework of the plan.

Their plan is clever but can be stopped if opponents of radical healthcare reform act quickly and focus on a core group of 23 Democratic Congressman. If just a few of these 23 Democrats are "flipped" and decide to oppose the bill, the whole Obama-Pelosi-Reid stratagem falls apart.

Here's what I learned top Democrats are planning to implement.

Senate Democrats will go to the House with a two-part deal.

First, the House will pass the Senate's Obamacare bill that passed the Senate in December. The House leadership will vote on the Senate bill, and Pelosi will allow no amendments or modifications to the Senate bill.

How will Pelosi's deal fly with rambunctious liberal members of her majority that don't like the Senate bill, especially its failure to include a public option, put heavy fines on those who don't get insurance and offering no income tax surcharge on the "rich"?

That's where the second part of the Pelosi-deal comes in.

Behind closed doors Reid and Pelosi have agreed in principle that changes to the Senate bill will be made to satisfy liberal House members -- but only after the Senate bill is passed and signed into law by Obama.

This is speculation at this point (because the 'negotiations' between Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have been conducted in secret), but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this is a pretty accurate guess. Get ready to dial your phone.

Ironically, 61% of America now thinks the entire thing should be scrapped and Congress should just start over from scratch. Obama's response to almost two-thirds of the nation? "I'm not gonna walk away just because it's hard. I'm gonna keep on working to get this done."

I guess that's why we now see this:

Obama's approval rating according to Gallup's tracking poll has hit a new low of 47%.

Rasmussen's model, which was vindicated yet again, along with Public Policy Polling, in Massachusetts last week, shows 55% of voters disapprove of Obama's job performance and 44% approve (43% strongly disapprove and 24% strongly approve).

Hm, fancy that. Another fun fact is that all this success is contagious:

Republican Scott Brown won 52%-47% in Massachusetts, which voted 62%-36% for Barack Obama in 2008. How did he do in each of Massachusetts’s 10 congressional districts, all of which are represented by Democrats who have been reelected without much opposition this decade? Blogger Fred Bauer has attempted to calculate the results, omitting results in cities or towns which are split between congressional districts. ... there’s a pattern here: Coakley carries districts where Obama got 65% or more of the vote and runs essentially even in the district where he got 64%, and Scott Brown runs ahead in districts where Obama got less than 64% of the vote.

Let’s extrapolate those numbers to the nation as a whole and assume that a district that voted 64% or more for Obama is safe for Democrats even under the most dire of circumstances. How many such districts are there? Answer, according to this source: 103.

That's 103 out of 435 that are safe for Dems. Of course, that is anecdotal. So what do the professionals think? Hmmm...

Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst who follows Congressional races, said a report he will release Monday will count 58 Democratic House seats in play, up from 47 in December. The number of Republican seats in play has held at 14 in that period, he said. And Democrats expect more of their incumbents to retire, which could put additional seats at risk.

Just to put it into perspective, if the GOP could snag about 2/3 of those 58 seats, that would flip the House to Republican power. This should be a really, really interesting year, don't you think?

There's my two cents.