[VIDEO] The Bernie Sanders bubble: Get set for a flameout, analysts say

A former chief strategist for Howard Dean, whose 2004 presidential hopes plummeted from rock star status to also-ran,
 predicts a similar fate for the Democratic darling of the 
moment, Vermont U.S. Sen. 
Bernie Sanders.

“There’s a big difference 
between 10,000 at a rally and turning out 3,500 caucus 
attenders on a cold winter night in Iowa. I suspect Bernie Sanders will learn the difference in February,” said Steve McMahon, Dean’s one-time top strategist. “His crowds are enthusiastic and large and fun to watch, but the question is whether they will be effective in the long run.”

Large crowds don’t necessarily translate into delegate support, McMahon said.

“Bernie Sanders needs to move the crowds into action and organize grass-roots support in the early states and so far, I haven’t seen any evidence that that’s occurring,” he said. “He doesn’t seem to be running a grass-roots campaign. It’s a campaign based on big crowds.”

The Summer of Sanders has seen the self-described socialist surge from nearly 50 points 
behind the Democratic front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to within 15 points, 
according to Real Clear Politics’ average of polls.

Sanders’ aides had to scramble to find a new venue to accommodate more than 7,500 screaming supporters Monday as a planned town hall morphed into a roaring rally in Portland, Maine.

Sanders also recently played to 10,000 fans in Madison, Wis.

“He is drawing massive crowds in all sorts of places,” said Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics. “In an Internet age, there’s a segment that increasingly values authenticity. You saw that with Ron Paul. I think Sanders taps into that.”

Sanders has earned the backing of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s anti-Wall Street wing of the Democratic party — mostly young, white progressives — but faces a challenge courting black voters, who have supported Clinton in the past, Trende said.

The 73-year-old Sanders does well in neighboring New Hampshire as a folk hero firebrand, but he likely will run out of steam, said Peter Hoe Burling, a former New Hampshire delegate for 
the Democratic National Committee.

“People talk about Howard Dean’s yowl, but the fact of the matter is, that campaign had peaked at a certain point,” Burling said. “It went as far as it was going to go and there’s the chance Bernie’s campaign is 
going to peak as well. In my mind, his campaign will peak at some point prior to the New Hampshire primary.”

Sanders can’t win in big states with deep reserves of delegates such as New York and California, said Matt Bennett, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist and Clinton supporter.

“He may do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he runs into a brick wall after that,” Bennett said.

“He’s not going to have the money or organization to challenge Secretary Clinton in multiple states at the same time on Super Tuesday,” Bennett said.

Sanders also could face high hurdles in the south, said Chip Felkel, a South Carolina-based Republican strategist not aligned with a presidential campaign.

“He’s been very impressive with what he’s been able to do crowd-wise and enthusiasm-wise,” he said. “I think that would carry over some in South Carolina, but he might be just plain too liberal for some of the Democrats around here.

“We’re just generally, even by national standards, more conservative in this state,” Felkel said.

“If he comes to South Carolina and has an impressive crowd, we’ll have to rethink that equation, but right now, I just don’t see it,” he said.

Via: Boston Herald

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Rep. Kinzinger: Obamacare 'Failing Much Faster than Expected'

Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Sunday the failure of the Obamacare website to function is symptomatic of a larger problem with the new healthcare system that will cost consumers more money and rob them of their current health plan.

"This thing is failing, but this is failing much faster than they expected," the freshman Republican from President Barack Obama's home state of Illinois told ABC's "This Week" program.

The website will eventually be fixed, Kinzinger said, but the bigger issue is that deductibles will go up by thousands of dollars.

"I'm not celebrating this because this hurts real Americans, but from a political perspective, we came out of a government shutdown where I think undoubtedly Republicans took the brunt of the hit and we had an immensely, amazingly quick change of fortunes," Kinzinger said.

Former Vermont Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean also appeared on the program, and described the failings of the website as an initial setback that will be forgotten once the program is in place for all Americans. 

"I think the greatest fear of the Republican Party is that this works, and I think it will work," Dean said.

But Kinzinger responded that one of the few issues Republicans are united on is that Obamacare is a flawed system. 

"We've been saying from the beginning this plan doesn't work," Kinzinger said. 

"It's beyond the website, and when the website gets fixed, I think Americans are going to be shocked to see that there is still a problem."


Via: Newsmax

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OBAMA'S INSURANCE 'FIX' IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Outlets are quoting Democratic operative Howard Dean saying of President Barack Obama suspending certain Obamacare requirements, “I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this.” 

To remove all doubt: The Take Care Clause of the Constitution absolutely forbids any president from doing exactly what Obama did Thursday.

Obama said he would allow insurance companies to keep offering previously-offered insurance plans that Americans would like to keep. Nobody knows if this means all plans, or only some of them, and how the White House will make such determinations. He says he has “enforcement discretion” to make this change to the Affordable Care Act unilaterally, without consulting Congress.

This is a frightening claim of a sweeping power that is completely inconsistent with the Constitution. A president has “prosecutorial discretion” to prioritize which lawbreakers to prosecute in federal court, but there is no “enforcement discretion” to determine which laws on the books he will enforce.

Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution commands of every president: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Like every provision in the Constitution, it has a legal meaning—and that meaning is the Supreme Law of the Land, which Congress, the courts, and—yes—each president is bound by his oath of office to follow carefully.

Everyone should know from their high-school government classes that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress exclusive power to make federal laws, and Article II of the Constitution gives the American president the executive power to administer and enforce those laws. Article II then includes the language about how the president must faithfully execute those laws.

Among other things, the Take Care Clause was inserted in the Constitution to abolish the Royal Prerogative that the Framers of the American Constitution knew from their lives as Englishmen. It was the power of the king of England to disregard or effectively suspend Acts of Parliament. The king could not make laws, but he could shelve a law that Parliament had passed.

Via: Breitbart

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Dean: Obamacare Is Going To Be Reason Dems "Pick Up Seats In The House"

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: If your insurance plan conforms with the requirements of Obamacare you don't have to go to the exchanges

BILL KRISTOL: Which very, very few, almost no, about 15% of individually purchased self-insurance plans do. And why is that? It was a free market. If people wanted to buy all those benefits they could have.

HOWARD DEAN: No, no, no. We kicked all those people out of our state when we did this, and it was a good thing we did because they were taking 50% of every premium dollar and keeping it for themselves.

What this is doing is driving the fly-by-night insurance companies out of the market or forcing the good ones who have bad policies--

KRISTOL: Wait, wait, wait, so when Blue Shield drops, when Blue Shield and these huge companies drop 300,000 people in Florida, those are fly-by-night insurance companies?

DEAN: First of all, Blue Shield is for profit so it's Anthem I'm sure in Florida especially. Second of all, yeah, even good companies have crappy policies with enormous deductibles.

KRISTOL: But the government, but the government, that's going to be great.

DEAN: The government has a right to make sure that when you buy something it is what it's supposed to be.

KRISTOL: And to force you into the exchange? That's what they're doing.

DEAN: I think that's okay because I think in the long run, what's been happening in the past is those policies that get sold don't cover what you think they cover. And furthermore, and this used to happen when I was practicing, an insurance company would pull your insurance if you got sick. That is not allowed anymore under Obamacare.

I think Obamacare is in fact going to be the reason that we are going to pick up seats in the House and we are not going to lose the Senate.

Via: Real Clear Politics

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Dean: No, really, Republicans are to blame for ObamaCare fiasco

Who’s to blame for the ObamaCare debacle? “First off all, in fairness,” Howard Dean told the Morning Joe crew earlier today, ou have to blame Republicans for some of this because they delayed everything they possibly could.” First we have to blame the party that (a) didn’t cast a single vote in favor of the ACA and (b) had no control over its 42-month rollout?  At which stage in the process do we hold responsible the people who spent $400 million in three and a half years, and who assured everyone all along the way that things were going swimmingly?

Probably 39th. Let’s not raise expectations too high (via Andrew Johnson at The Corner):

Dean went on to blame the Republican governors who wisely decided not to tempt fate with their own exchange systems:

“The problem is they shouldn’t have done a single-size-fits-all for the 36 states,” he continued. “Partly, I have to say, they had to do that because the Republican governors refused to accept exchanges.”

Dean went on to downplay the problems facing the websites, saying the glitches are “not big.”

Dean suggests that the White House should have built regional systems rather than national systems in order to make the process less complicated.  How exactly would that have helped? HHS couldn’t even build one system that connects the consumers to the insurers and the IRS properly, but they could have built four or five simultaneously?  That sounds like the kind of thinking that went into the Obama administration’s reform policies and managerial efforts on ObamaCare all along.

Via: Hot Air

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Obamacare’s four-year government shutdown

The federal government’s shutdown at midnight on October 1, 2013 was a long time in the making. The seeds were planted back in 2009 with the divisive passage of the Affordable Care Act. Since then, the entire United States government has been grinding to a slow, painful halt over this law. To understand the current shutdown, we must recall that Obamacare has been mired in a political grudge match on both sides of the aisle from its very conception.

Following huge electoral victories for Democrats in 2008, the president decided — against the pleadings of his closest advisers — to make healthcare his first priority. Almost immediately, the president was met with massive opposition, as this increasingly unpopular law was not supported by Republicans and the growing Tea Party. Counting his 60-vote bloc in the Senate, and a huge margin in the House, the president and Senate Democrats pushed on, deeming it unnecessary to have any bipartisan support.

Never before was such a monumental piece of legislation passed on a straight-party line vote, with zero support from the opposing party. In August 2009, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean attempted to justify the “pass it at any cost” approach: “All the really great programs in American history, Social Security, [were] done without Republicans. Medicare was done without Republican support until the last vote where they realized they had to get on board.” He was wrong. The Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, The Social Security Amendments of 1965, which created Medicaid and Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, were all passed with bipartisan support in both houses of Congress.

Via: Daily Caller

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No Good Path to Re-election for Obama

The number of negative events that have hit President Obama this week is not unprecedented but the quality of the bad news (9 on a scale of 1 to 10) should make one think that he is not electable. That’s the good news. The bad news is don't count him out yet.

In the past week we have seen a serious mic gaffe at the nuclear summit and while he was trying to walk back his comments that no one was buying, his top legal minds were getting beaten up in front of the Supreme Court. It was so bad that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, had to be thrown a lifetime by the liberal justices (I think they truly felt sorry for him). Gas prices continue to rise to unprecedented levels. A recent poll shows 68% of Americans are angry at the president, his approval rating is hovering around 41%, and we won't even mention his comments about Trayvon Martin which has taken us in so many directions it's hard to keep track. The former DNC chairman Howard Dean predicted that the individual mandate would be declared unconstitutional. Current DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in staying true to her fantasy thinking says that Obama's base is “pretty darn excited” as they were in 2008. I think not. All of this leaves Obama in a very precarious position. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.