Joblessness and Obamacare set the stage for GOP election wins
Suddenly, with two roll-call votes, the messy, multi-issue battles of the 2014 elections have been refocused on two central issues that will put the GOP back in charge of Congress. The budget and debt-limit fights have been set aside for the time being, with the swift votes this week for a debt-limit extension and the earlier passage of a budget to keep the government running for the rest of this year. This means that the midterm election battles for the rest of this year will be turned into a clear referendum on the voters’ two foremost concerns: a weak, jobless economy and the increasingly unpopular, dictatorial Obamacare law. Democrats, who rarely if ever talk about either of these issues, were hoping and praying that this year’s elections would remain muddy enough for them to save a number of their House and Senate seats from GOP takeovers. However, House Republicans couldn’t agree on any subset of demands they hoped to extract from Senate Democrats in the debt-limit bill, forcing House Speaker John A. Boehner to offer a “clean” bill and end the issue for the year. It quickly passed the Senate. Now the focus returns full-bore to two major issues on which President Obama and the Democats are weakest among the general electorate. The early signs suggest they will get creamed on both in the fall, as the economy plunges into another slump, and Obamacare lurches from one debacle after another. If anyone thinks for a moment that the White House is not worried about the political fallout of all of this, consider what the president did Tuesday. He abruptly handed midsized-business employers a politically driven reprieve from his health care law.
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