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John Fund thinks 2014 might be a Dem disaster.
If a panic button existed in the offices of vulnerable Democrats in Congress right now, they might be pressing it so often it wouldn’t have time to reset.
A new CNN poll this week found that support for Obamacare is down to an all-time low of 35 percent. That helps explain the dramatic partisan reversal in another question CNN asked — about which party respondents would vote for in their congressional district. Two months ago, Democrats had a 50–42 percent lead on that critical “generic ballot” question. Now, Republicans have taken a 49–44 lead. Other private polls taken in the last few days confirm the trend of the CNN poll.
Of course, Democratic leaders insist that Obamacare won’t hurt their party in the 2014 elections. House speaker Nancy Pelosi told a conference call with reporters this week that the bill she once said had to be passed “so that you can find out what is in it” was “worth the trouble, it’s going to be a glorious thing.” She insisted it would help Democrats pick up House seats next year.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid doesn’t go so far as to rhapsodize like Pelosi about Obamacare, but he still insisted to The Hill newspaper on December 18 that “for sure it will be a net positive” in the elections.
Pelosi and Reid have a point: A lot can happen politically over the next ten months. …
Mega Dittos from Byron York who says this is the year the Dems will pay for obamacare.
As Democrats survey a troubled 2014 political landscape, it’s easy to forget how optimistic they seemed less than a year ago.
“I would expect that Nancy Pelosi is going to be speaker again pretty soon,” President Obama told cheering House Democrats at a party retreat last February.
In the rosy scenario that took hold in some Democratic circles, the party was positioned to recapture the House in 2014 and maintain control of the Senate, allowing Obama to defy the history of second-term presidential decline. Great successes and good years lay ahead.
Had Democrats forgotten Obamacare, the law they passed in 2010 that was scheduled to take effect in 2014? It almost seemed as if they had.
Obama and his allies put off the arrival of Obamacare until after the president faced re-election in 2012. His administration also delayed releasing key rules regarding the law until after the election for fear of angering voters. But now they can’t put it off any longer. 2014 will be the year Democrats pay for Obamacare. …
Peter Wehner on why we’re tired of the president.
A new Gallup poll finds President Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent and his disapproval rating at 54 percent. But it’s not just that the public is increasingly displeased with the job Mr. Obama is doing; they are growing weary of the whole packaged deal. They are frustrated with the president, his style, his attitude, his approach to the job.
The Boston Herald reports:
President Obama’s tanking approval rating in newly released polls shows Americans are tired of his whining, according to some experts, who also see a fighting chance for Republicans to rack up coast-to-coast victories in the 2014 midterm congressional races.
“We think of presidents as being morale leaders … and he goes out and complains,” according to Richard Benedetto, a retired White House correspondent and a journalism professor at AmericanUniversity. “He complains about the fact that he doesn’t get enough cooperation from the other side. ‘It’s not my fault, it’s the Republicans’ fault.’ And that message gets old for the American public. … It’s not a good sign for Democrats in Congress going into next year.” …
For some reason Jennifer Rubin posts on how the president can have a better 2014.
The president’s final news conference of the year was hardly inspiring. One senses he’s adrift, maybe even disoriented. The once political messiah is now widely derided, ignored and/or disliked. Still, we all have three years of this to go. What would help to make 2014 a better year for the president?
1. Stop accusing opponents of operating in bad faith. One of the low moments in a very low news conference was his accusation that senators advocating sanctions are only interested in their own reelection. This particular insult was aimed at Democrats as well as Republicans, but his accusations of mendacity make him look small and even mean. Moreover, it simply incentivizes his opponents to strike back.
2. A better staff. The most respected Cabinet official in his entire presidency arguably was defense secretary Robert Gates, with defense secretary and then CIA director Leon Panetta a distant second. Who does he have now? Literally no one who has credibility. One and all they are perceived as partisan and spinners. Obama needs to give up his security blanket of yes-men and flunkies, hire some esteemed advisers and then listen to them.
3. No more government by whimsy and fiat. …
Paul Mirengoff calls attention to a Michael Barone column.
Michael Barone has written an important column about the relationship between the breakdown of the American family and income inequality and lack of social mobility. Barone relies in part on Nick Shultz’s book Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure which I have not read.
Barone’s thesis — that growing up outside of a two-parent family means lower income, less social mobility, and less “human capital” — is not controversial among social scientists. It is affirmed, Barone says, by undoubted liberals such as Harvard’s David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks.
Yet this fact seems vastly underappreciated in public policy debates. …
Naturally, we have Barone’s piece.
Christmastime is an occasion for families to come together. But the family is not what it used to be, as my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Nick Schulz argues in his short AEI book Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure.
It’s a subject that many people are uncomfortable with. “Everyone either is or knows and has a deep personal connection to someone who is divorced, cohabiting, or gay,” Schulz writes. “Great numbers of people simply want to avoid awkward talk of what are seen as primarily personal issues or issues of individual morality.”
Nonetheless, it is an uncomfortable truth that children of divorce and children with unmarried parents tend to do much worse in life than children of two-parent families. (I’ll leave aside the sensitive issue of children of same-sex marriages because these haven’t existed in a non-stigmatized atmosphere long enough to produce measurable results.) …
Examiner Blog post on the losers in the Duck Dynasty flap.
Now that A&E executives have surrendered to the will of hundreds of thousands of “Duck Dynasty” fans and welcomed Phil Robertson back to the show nearly 10 days after creating a firestorm when they suspended him for expressing views about sexuality that are shared by many other conservative Christians, it’s time to see who the winners and losers are.
The winners: Robertson and his family.They held fast to their values and learned how deep their fan base really is. The family’s admission of regret about his statements to GQ was no surrender, given that his comments were never about hate as opponents had insinuated.
The losers: A&E executives, of course, who knew all along that the Robertson family members were conservative Christians, yet did the world’s worst imitation of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” when gay rights groups complained.
And while we’re on that subject, the other big loser is GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination, which showed how far it had strayed off the path of encouraging tolerance into the dark woods where conformity is enforced by witch hunts and demands for blood sacrifices. GLAAD’s intolerance sparked what its leaders called the worst backlash they’d ever seen — a backlash that included prominent members of the gay community such as Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.
That’s right: Two groups of smug, urban sophisticates got outsmarted by a backwoodsman who shoots ducks for a living.
Heckuva job, folks.