The Washington Post reports: “A top Democrat acknowledged Thursday that President (Barack) Obama’s health care bill hurt his party in 2010. And a new study suggests it cost the Democrats something pretty specific: their House majority.
“‘It was clearly a liability in the last election in terms of the public’s fear,’ House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Thursday. …
“The study, by five professors from institutions across the country, looks at the health-care bill alongside other contentious votes in the 111th Congress and determines that, more so than the stimulus or the cap-and-trade energy bill, it cost Democrats seats. In fact, they lost almost exactly the number of seats that decided the majority.”
Whoops. That’s a high political cost for something that may be unconstitutional.
In any event, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the taxes, the impact on the debt and the drag on small-business growth and hiring are all negative aspects of Obamacare that Mitt Romney should begin to emphasize.
Indeed, there is a good argument for why Obamacare should be a critical part of Romney’s message: Obama’s policy choices are rendering this economic “recovery” unusually slow and weak. Romney is on solid ground on the basic argument that Obama’s recovery is much more tepid than the Reagan recovery.
Ed Carson of Investor’s Business Daily explains: “The longest jobs recession in decades coincides, not coincidentally, with the longest stretch of anemic economic performance on record. … After the severe 1981-82 recession, the U.S. economy enjoyed a five-quarter stretch of 7 percent or more following a 5.1 percent annualized gain. The U.S. economy (now) is up just 6.2 percent above the level at the end of the recession vs. 14.9 percent in the 10 quarters after the 1981-82 slump.”
Romney should make the simple argument: Get Obama out of the way and with him Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank legislation, a chunk of discretionary spending and the planned tax hikes and put in place his agenda tax cuts, entitlement reform, reduced regulation and domestic energy development and the economy will take off.
Now that is a positive, conservative message that the Republican Party, and maybe even the country, can get behind.
Trudy Rubin is a Washington Post columnist.
