When former Obama adviser and campaign manager David Plouffe said on Sunday that running against Obamacare would be an "impossibility" for Republicans, his reasoning seemed dubious. By the fall of 2014, Plouffe insisted, "millions of people will be signed up," and Republicans would struggle to convince them to give up their new insurance. While those figures seem optimistic, Plouffe's argument should not be dismissed.
Democrats designed Obamacare to be repeal-proof. They followed the advice of veteran Chicago strategist (and convicted felon) Robert Creamer, who wrote Democrats' political blueprint for passing "universal health care" in 2006-7, partly while he was serving time in federal prison for bank fraud and tax evasion. The idea was to use health care reform as the first in a series of sweeping, "progressive" changes in America.
Throughout the Obamacare fight in 2009 and 2010, Creamer admonished Democrats that their electoral fortunes depended on their ability to pass the bill and motivate Obama's core supporters: "[H]istory tells us that if Obama doesn't deliver on things like health care reform, his numbers and the Democratic brand will sink and leave many Democratic candidates for Congress looking for other lines of work," he wrote.
What Creamer overlooked, of course, was that many of the Democrats who voted for Obamacare were from relatively conservative districts, including some that had only recently been poached from Republicans in the 2006 midterms. By following his advice, Democrats lost the House--and also lost several state legislatures, allowing the GOP to redraw districts and dash Obama's dreams of a permanent progressive majority.
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