In a story not filed with The Onion, Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC is defending fellow Democrats up for election in 2014 by, wait for it, bashing Obamacare.
That’s right. The same big government set that promised they’d run on the unpopular law and “stand tall” in its electoral headlights are now railing on the law for political survival.
Were it not so ridiculous, it’d be funny.
Their latest crock of an ad seeks to defend Rep. Joe Garcia in Florida. “He took the White House to task for the disastrous healthcare website,” it says in part.
Of course, he was also filmed applauding President Obama’s defense of the law in last month’s State of the Union and refuses to support efforts at repeal, but that’s here nor there.
For House Majority PAC, it’s the second such effort since the start of 2014. A similar ad was recently put up in support of Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona. It features a similar refrain, saying the congresswoman “blew the whistle on the disastrous healthcare website” she voted in favor of and has since bucked repealing.
That was one was ridiculed by fact checkers and the Arizona Republic, with the word “dubious” making an appearance. Another assessment simply read “Whistle-blower? Not so much.”
The Miami Herald’s coverage of the Garcia ad brandished a headline reading “Dems House Majority PAC bashes Republicans? Nah. Obamacare, White House.”
If the problems confronting Democrats in 2014 weren’t clear before, they definitely should be now.
Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz has promised their candidates would be proudly running on Obamacare in 2014, as have many other top leaders in the party. As I mentioned, Pelosi promised to walk tall on the law.
Yet here we are. In February, just under nine months before the election. And Pelosi’s own Super PAC is bashing the law she championed in the pursuit of her wielding the speaker’s gavel again.
Particularly telling about this is that the first push this far out from the election is to throw Obamacare under the bus instead of defend it. Both ads jumps right into to blasting the law on three consecutive fronts, only then following up by mentioning the pre-existing conditions clause.
Even left out of that mention is that it was part of the Affordable Care Act.
These ploys reek of utter desperation as it becomes clear that Obamacare’s cratering numbers are giving them an electoral albatross they simply can’t afford to own.
A similar refrain is all but assured to seep into red state Senate contests.
It’s not hard to imagine the Democratic machine propping up Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, and Mary Landrieu in the same fashion, nor is it ridiculous to imagine Michelle Nunn in Georgia saying she would’ve taken on the White House had she been in the Senate.
Unfortunately for all of them, though, associations, paper trails, and voting records don’t lie.
Reality is that none of these Democrats have made a credible effort to rein in the law, and many of them aided its passage in the first place. And you need only follow House Majority PAC’s money trail to find Pelosi running that show, saying whatever needs to be done in an attempt to recapture the majority.
That’s unlikely to happen, though. The Washington Post pegs Democrats’ chances of taking the House at a mere one percent. Others contend the Senate is in closer reach for Republicans than ever expected this time last year.
At this point, one thing is very clear. Obamacare as an issue isn’t going anyway anytime soon, despite their best efforts at changing the topic. That evidently hasn’t worked, considering they’re now throwing their own creation under the bus.