http:\/\/herit.ag\/1aIYDxd<\/a><\/i><\/b>) almost everyone in almost every state will see insurance premiums shoot up.\u00a0 In Virginia, which just elected an Obamare advocate as governor, the jump will be 179% for a family of four, 253% for a 27-year-old young person.<\/p>\nBut here is a question.\u00a0 Imagine you are sitting in the White House, looking at the meltdown.\u00a0 Yes, it\u2019s alarming.\u00a0 Are you all that worried?\u00a0 Your big goal is the 2014 election.\u00a0 Based on the just concluded 2013 ballot, don\u2019t you calculate that, while the situation is challenging, it is manageable?<\/p>\n
The two big contests this time were the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia.\u00a0 Yes, the GOP won New Jersey, but the state never was in play.\u00a0 And of all Republican governors, Chris Christie has been by far the most friendly towards the president, arguably giving him a critical boost at a key moment in last year\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
Besides, Virginia is a much better analog to the nation than New Jersey.\u00a0 For a decade now it has been as closely divided as America itself.\u00a0 Obamacare is as unpopular there as in the nation generally.\u00a0 But with dislike of the law on Election Day at what the White House must assume will prove its maximum moment, the Democrat still won.\u00a0 A full embracer of the president\u2019s program, he beat one of the nation\u2019s most vocal Obamacare critics, the state attorney general who initiated the now-failed suit challenging the law\u2019s constitutionality.<\/p>\n
The president clearly believes in federal domination of health financing and delivery.\u00a0 In politics you take risks with your popularity to back things you care about. \u00a0Mr. Obama took that risk, and at the moment, he would be right to feel he has won.<\/p>\n
Not only did he win in Virginia, but the way Mr. McAuliffe achieved victory must give Mr. Obama confidence that he can prevail in the 2014 House and Senate battles, as well.<\/p>\n
I am not talking about McAuliffe\u2019s smash-mouth ads of the summer and the overwhelming dollar advantage. Those took their toll, but more critical was the GOP\u2019s splintering.\u00a0 We all know that the some libertarians broke off in one direction.\u00a0 Less noticed, a group of so-called establishment Republicans appears to have broken off in the other.<\/p>\n
With both, social issues may have been key drivers.\u00a0 Some say the easy solution is to nominate a moderate candidate who is wishy-washy on those questions. But if the party does that, social conservatives are likely to break off or at least stay home, as happened in Ohio during last year\u2019s presidential voting, costing Mitt Romney the state.<\/p>\n
In other words, if you were in the White House today, surveying the wreckage of your health care launch, you would still have to conclude that, in the races you care about for 2014, the Republicans are by and large likely to prove fatally fractured.<\/p>\n
Obamacare may be an abomination and, at least for the moment, a failure. \u00a0But unless the Republican Party and its natural affiliates can find peace among themselves, Obamacare will remain the law of the land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, there is one thing you can say about Obamacare. Yes, it reflects the kind of \u201csweep away everything to impose our vision of the ultimate good on everyone\u201d mentality that we all loved so much about the Soviet Union.\u00a0 But it took the Soviet Union 75 years to fall of its own weight.\u00a0 It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[194,12,60,64],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-election","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-obama","tag-obamacare"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1681,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions\/1681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}