By David Limbaugh
Pollster Celinda Lake’s advice to fellow Democrats to take a midway position in the 2014 congressional campaigns is flawed because it can’t be sold as honest.
Reacting to results from her bipartisan Battleground Poll that show Obamacare to be a political loser, Lake said: “Don’t defend it. Say it was flawed from the beginning and we’re going to fix it.”
Note that she didn’t advise to reject it outright, apparently because she knows that’s never going to fly with President Obama and the Democratic establishment and probably because it would be tantamount to an admission that the party has failed in its central policy “achievement.”
But her advice to adopt a middle-of-the-road position is not much different. To say the law was flawed from the beginning is a damning admission, especially considering how inflexible the Democrats were when they crammed this albatross through Congress.
I just read a story reminding us that Democrats had a chance to try a more moderate approach in 2009, when then-Sen. Max Baucus warned that Democrats could ram through a health care overhaul on a partisan vote, but wouldn’t be able to sustain it. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended up scuttling Baucus’ attempt to scale back the bill. So Democrats had a chance to moderate it, but they went full-bore defiance and stuffed it down our throats.
How is it going to play now if they say the following? “We see now the error of our ways; we shouldn’t have been so extreme. Give us another chance, because we only want to help you.”
The inescapable fact is that Democrats have supported this law the whole way, to the detriment of millions of Americans and to the impending destruction of our health care system. Democratic candidates can opportunistically pretend they’ll buck the party to fix this system, but modern history shows they march in lock step with their leftist leadership. Compromise and moderation are not in their vocabulary.
Another major problem with Lake’s advice is that the law is fundamentally flawed. It is not fixable. By design, it took over the entire health care system. You can’t improve it with incremental changes. It has to be eradicated before it does irreversible damage.
Notice that Lake, like all good Democrats, will never acknowledge that the concept was ill-conceived, for “good intentions” will always be the Democrats’ preferred currency, their last line of defense.
Read more: Washington Examiner
