How sweet it is for Democrats to have a leader who plays offense and puts the MAGA Republicans back on their heels.
Democrats by tradition have been notoriously reactive, curling into fetal positions while under attack, allowing the GOP to set the rhetorical agenda. But President Biden doesn’t play that losing game.
Quite the opposite, as evidenced the other day when he told a Virginia audience that if zealous budget-cutting House Republicans try to put their mitts on Obamacare and Medicaid, they’ll collide with a brick wall – namely, him. He warned: “For millions of Americans, health care remains in the balance, he warned. “If MAGA Republicans try to take away people’s health care by gutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, I will stop them.”
MAGA Republicans haven’t officially said – yet- that they intend to target those crucial programs (as part of their well-publicized goal of reducing budgetary red ink, the same red ink they didn’t care about when Trump was president), and here’s the main reason:
Obamacare and Medicaid are popular with real people struggling to live real lives.
Biden is taking full advantage of the Republicans’ reticence, painting their party in advance as out of step with the American mainstream – just in case they do decide to flout their extremism with new proposals to slash and burn. (Some GOPers are already floating an unofficial proposal to slash Medicaid coverage and burn $600 billion out of Obamacare.)
Why are congressional Republican leaders, concerned anew about the budget deficits they ignored under Trump, clearly so reluctant to vocally attack Obamacare and Medicaid and put them on the chopping block? The facts tell the story. The facts tells us why Biden has the wind at his back.
Obamacare was an albatross for Democrats when it was enacted 13 years ago; in the 2010 midterm elections, public hostility to Obamacare fueled the red wave that swept House Republicans into power with a pickup of 63 seats. But today, Obamacare (in conjunction with expanded Medicaid benefits) is been woven into the American fabric. Earlier this year, in the latest open enrollment period, a record 16 million people signed up for those health plans (a 13 percent hike over last year), and more than 35 million people now have Obamacare-related coverage. Last year, the percentage of uninsured Americans hit an all-time low. Meanwhile, many hospitals in rural red states have managed to stay open thanks to billions in aid from Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that Republicans no longer talk trash about Obamacare. For a number of years, they were addicted to hyperbole. Like when they warned about Obamacare’s purported “death panels.” (There were no death panels). Like when then-House Speaker John Boehner warned that Obamacare would usher in “Armageddon.” Like when they predicted that few Americans would bother to sign up. Like when Mitch McConnell said, “I don’t think Albert Einstein could make this thing work.” Like when fellow Senator John Thune said that Obamacare was “destined to fail.” Like when virtually all of them chanted the phrase “train wreck.” Like when Trump decreed that Obamacare should die (“What we want to do is terminate it”). He failed (of course) because his MAGA troops in Congress didn’t have a program to put in its place, and because there was little public appetite for replacing it.
In fact, Democrats flipped the House from red to blue in the 2018 midterms by highlighting the benefits of Obamacare and warning voters that the GOP was jonesing to sabotage those benefits. Republicans got so freaked out that they ran campaign ads denying any such intent.
Republicans would risk political suicide if they tried to balance the budget on the backs of Obamacare enrollees. According to the latest national poll, Obamacare has solid public support (52 percent yes, 36 percent no; among swing-voting independents, it’s 50-34 percent), which mirrors other national surveys (a year ago, the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll said the spread was 55-42). Indeed, the popularity of Obamacare has buoyed public support for federal health care in general’; according to Gallup last month, 57 percent of Americans (including 59 percent of independents) now say that government should ensure health care for all.
Biden took the offensive this week, daring Republicans to target health care benefits, because he knows full well that it’s brain-dead politics to take away something that Americans already have. Deep down, his antagonists across the aisle know this, too. When Biden announced, during his State of the Union speech, that he was “pleased to say that more Americans have health insurance now than ever in history,” their reaction was noteworthy:
No boos. No screeches of “Liar!” They sat silently, as history’s roadkill.