Getting ready for repeal-a-palooza.
Obamacare just isn't panning out to be much of an issue this election cycle, despite the Kochs' best efforts and millions of dollars in deceptive campaign ads throughout most of the year. In the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, only
8 percent of registered voters listed the law as the most important issue for them this cycle. Republican candidates themselves are talking about pretty much everything but Obamacare on the stump, with a heavy dose of Ebola and ISIS and Ebola-laden ISIS. But, as Simon Maloy
notices, it's making a comeback in last minute ads, notably from Karl Rove. Why? To "manufacture a mandate."
If the GOP looks to be in control of both houses of Congress when the dust settles on November 5, hacks like Rove will get themselves on TV and argue that the American people kicked the Democrats out of power because of the Affordable Care Act, and the new Congress will have a clear “mandate” to repeal the law.
Rove’s not the only one working to foster this perception of sudden and overwhelming anti-ACA sentiment. Bloomberg Politics analyzed the ad spending data for Senate races across the country and found that expenditures on anti-ACA political ads spiked dramatically in the second week of October. “Between Oct. 7 and 13, there were 11,782 anti-Obamacare ads on TV in Senate races across the country,” Bloomberg found, “with the biggest concentrations in four of the nation’s hottest campaigns: Kentucky, Iowa, Louisiana and Colorado.” This, too, was a predictable development. The message that conservatives and Republicans want to send is that America was motivated to get out and vote because they hate Obamacare so much.
Why? Because they know that the traditional media loves to have their narrative handed to them on a silver platter, and because this is a storyline that is oh, so easy for them to follow. Take a very recent example, this week's
Obamacare report card from
The New York Times that blithely stated that the law has "fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash." As if it was something actually within the law or how it was implemented that created backlash, and not just the very existence of it.
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This way, if Republicans regain the Senate and say it was because of Obamacare, they can waste another two years doing nothing but futile repeal votes, and the traditional media won't call them on it. They can wring every last drop of Obamacare hatred out of their dwindling base for one more election cycle, not to mention all that Koch money to be had in "fighting" it.