To: one_less who wrote (821745 ) 12/10/2014 12:18:10 PM From: joseffy Read Replies (1) | Respond to Harry Reid: ObamaCare rollout killed us, not the issues Hotair ^ | 12/10/2014 | Ed MorrisseyReid tells Jeremy Peters in a New York Times profile that the American people agree with Democrats on the issues, despite what the polls and two elections have made very clear to practically everyone else. If it hadn’t been for those darned kids at HHS, Reid would have gotten away with another election cycle, dagnabbit (via TWS ): Mr. Reid’s remarks, which he made in an interview from his suite just off the Senate chamber (the door outside will say “Office of the Majority Leader” for another few weeks), reflected a hardening sense within the Democratic Party that voters still supported its positions on issues like raising the minimum wage, college affordability and women’s rights. But Mr. Reid and his fellow Democrats also believe that they did a poor job of communicating their policies in a way that gave voters a reason to look past the deepening dysfunction in Washington. The level of denial here is staggering, but not terribly surprising. The midterms had been running off the rails for Democrats for months, not just “a few days before the election.” True, some of the polling had a couple of races close, such as in Kansas and Georgia, but that turned out to be bad polling, not reality. There was no late-arising turnout surge that changed the dynamics of those elections — just the same ticked-off voters who turned out in 2010, too.grasped that much in his post-mortem a few days after the election ( as did Tom Harkin , while missing the larger point). The rollout exposed the incompetence of the Obama administration, but the iceberg in this case was ObamaCare itself, which has always been unpopular with voters. Democrats seized their one moment of having unchallengeable control of Washington DC to shove that down voters’ throats rather than work on immigration or real economic and tax reforms that could have made the recovery something more than Stagnation Lite for five years.a politician long past his expiration date. Reid’s bitterness consumes him, and Peters eggs it on a bit himself in his description of a post-election mutiny within Reid’s caucus. He describes six Senate Democrats who refused to vote for Reid as “irascible,” which seems rather ironic after getting that far into the profile of Reid. The soon-to-be Minority Leader pledges to be obstructionist, sneers at the six who voted against him for the position, and in general doesn’t have a kind word for anyone but himself. Reid has collapsed into a caricature of petulance and selfishness, and it’s not clear that either he or Peters realizes it. He’s only a purloined bank deposit away from being Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life .
