1. You should fight a health insurance law, of which the conservative Heritage Foundation was a major architect.
2. You should keep fighting the law throughout the President's reelection through legal battles, GOP presidential primary debates, and meaningless repeal votes in the House of Representatives.
3. As for the legal battle, you should spend million dollars funding the legal challenge so everyone knows you are serious because, in your view, the law is unconstitutional.
4. You should nominate the GOP governor as your party's standard bearer, who created a very similar health insurance law which is to this day a stunning example of how well the health insurance law will work. This helps your cause because in case your legal challenge is unsuccessful, you want a presidential nominee who will seek to replace the law with something else (like Romneycare but not like Obamacare despite the fact that everyone on the right views Romneycare as liberal Massachusetts version of Obamacare).
5. As for the repeal votes, you should votes to repeal this law 43 times --- cause that tells us how serious you are.
6. You should enlist the assistance of every GOP governor to do as little as possible to move the law ahead --- actions that only hurt the voters of the state. See Tom Corbett as a major example of how this hurts the self-same governors' reelection chances.
7. You should use the debt limit process in Congress ---- which your party has used to finance pointless wars and tax cuts for the rich ---- to gut a law that will help the middle class, students, minorities, single parent families and young voters. You should go out of the way to alienate as many of these groups in general; as a demographic point of view, these groups will eventually render your base (older angry white people and ultra-conservative Christians) into a meaningless minority.
8. You should try to defund the program, even though by doing so you cede the "we want too repeal this bad law" argument. Defunding the program means you recognize the law a valid but you don't want it to have the money to work now. (BTW, the law has basically built in a bypass to get around recalcitrant governors and legislatures so the federal government steps in to create exchanges if the states fail to act.)
9. Given the fact that the exchanges are opening in a couple of days and government shutdown or not, people are going to begin choosing health insurance plans for themselves, the defunding is stupid all by itself so you quickly move to number 10.
10. So oppose, debate, repeal, appeal, don't cooperate, and defund don't work and now you are begging for delay. Between October 1 and March 31 of next year, people will buy insurance from either state exchanges or ones set up by the feds.
Come November 2014, a lot of voters (read young voters) will have purchased health insurance. You think they will watch a commercial that reminds them that "Congressman X voted 43 times to repeal ACA, he supported paying millions to fight the law in the US Supreme Court, he fought to gut and defund the ACA and he wanted to delay giving voters access to low cost health insurance. But he gets great health insurance and its free for him but he wants to keep you from getting the same health care he has. Congressman X is working against us. Its time for him to go."