Posted on 09/30/2013 10:57:48 PM PDT by CharlesWayneCT
A rare vanity. Sorry.
The republicans fail at messaging. Here is the messaging they could use tonight, but won't:
"To be clear about what happened tonight. The Republicans, caving in to almost ALL of the Democratic demands, and in a last-ditch effort to keep the government from shutting down, passed a compromise.
That compromise fully funded everything, including Obamacare, just like the "clean CR" the senate passed.
But it also had one additional feature. It had a one-year delay in a TAX INCREASE on people who did not buy insurance. Most of these people who would have to pay this tax were having to do so because Obama had already illegally exempted business from having to provide these people insurance.
This had nothing to do with health care, it was simply tax relief for people who didn't buy health insurance.
But the democrats don't want people to get tax relief, even if they need it because their employer doesn't have to provide insurance. So instead, they shut down the government. All over a tax increase.
But since the IM is actually in the form of a tax increase for those who fail to buy insurance, we really aren't talking about health care at all, or modifying "obamacare". We are talking about tax relief, and the democrats shut down government over a tax increase.
What kind of benefit is anyone getting except the government?
Nice try. I think the spin on this is lost. Everyone knows this is an ideological fight. The polls show public sentiment is against.
The caucus is split and the stories and comments show. The Dems are in lockstep. The republicans ran through the play book in a day. The planning, execution, and pr game have been mismanaged. What is the end game here? I am a smart guy but I do not see how the republican caucus wins here. What is a win? Keep it shut down forever? Obama will cave?
I am sorry I want to be happy over a shutdown but I remember 95 and 96. The goals were better defined 3 of 5 funding bills were passed so the shutdown was not as broad.
I have said it for a week. Republicans will cave probably within a week. Because of the reasons above we are going to lose and lose badly.
All this and Obamacare is on line now!
I hope I am wrong but I doubt it.
They can post on YouTube if they want to talk directly to the public. They fail at messaging because they choose to do so.
LIke I said, it could be very clever, if they realize it.
First of all, you and I know conservatives were lock-step into “defunding Obamacare”. And yet Boehner managed to get the conservative caucus to vote for fully funding Obamacare.
That is a pretty big deal. We all seem happy, and I don’t know why, because if the democrats had accepted the deal, Obamacare would be fully funded today.
Second, the one-year-delay of the individual mandate is wildly popular. Most people don’t like the IM to begin with, and think it was very unfair to keep once Obama waived the employer mandate.
Without the employer mandate, a lot of employees don’t have health insurance. Obama has denied health insurance. But worse, those people, because of the IM, are required to BUY insurance, or else get a big tax increase.
The Republican move would have given those folks the OPTION of going without insurance. This is NOT “denying health care” to anybody. Every person could still buy health insurance — there was not defunding of Obamacare, so the exchanges were still funded and the subsidies were funded.
All that the republicans asked was that we not levy tax increases on people who lost their insurance because of Obama’s illegal waiver.
That is a message that we can easily win. “Republicans are for tax waiver, democrats oppose tax relief and shut down government”.
The third part I thought was silly, but from a messaging perspective is powerful — the democrats shut down government to make sure they personally got subsidies for THIER health insurance in the exchanges, even though others won’t, and those who won’t get taxed for not joining.
So when democrats claim republicans tried to defund Obamacare, republicans can point out that this is a lie, and if the media is at all fair they will have to point this out. When the democrats claim the IM change was unacceptable, the republicans can point out they were just providing tax relief, and it had nothing to do with people’s access to health insurance.
I am not sure Reid knew what he was doing. By sending him successive bills, he got into the habit of just summarily rejecting them without thought. The first two were defunding bills, but this last bill was not. Did he fall for a trap? We’ll see.
Some valid points except one year mandate delay wildly popular. When you ask shut down because of Obamacare it is 60-37 stay open.
Again though most battles are won or lost before the first shot. I think the preperation was crap and sending 4 different bills to senate was poor. The public doesn’t understand nuance they hear blah blah blah Obamacare.
This is the e-mail I sent to my two democratic senators:
Honorable Senator Warner,
While I disagreed with your vote, I could at least understand why you chose to reject a Continuing Resolution that defunded Obamacare.
However, the last Continuing Resolution passed by the House fully funded Obamacare. But you still voted against it. Why?
There were two riders on the bill, but neither had anything to do with Obamacare funding. The one of course was to remove subsidies for politicians buying insurance in the exchanges. If you disagreed with that, it would have been easy enough for the house and senate to fix that before january when it would have taken effect. But in any case, you certainly didn’t decide to shut down government and take paychecks from hundreds of thousands of public employees just so you could get $15,000 in health insurance premium relief. You have millions of dollars.
The second rider was a tax relief measure, giving people without insurance a one-year reprieve from special taxes. Many of those people will be without insurance because Obama unilaterally gave their employers a reprieve from providing insurance. Obama essentially denied health insurance to hundreds of thousands of employees for one year.
The Republicans tried to help those people, by giving them tax relief for the same one-year period. But you voted against this tax relief for the uninsured.
This had nothing to do with health care. Under the republican CR, the exchanges were fully funded, money was there for subsidies. Every person who WANTED to buy insurance would have the opportunity. The ONLY thing the Republicans asked for was to NOT TAX people who had not purchased insurance. In one sense, they were asking to provide tax relief to the uninsured.
But you voted against this. You just shut down the entire federal government simply so that you could force the uninsured people to pay additional taxes next year.
SO I ask — why did you do this? Why shut down government for a small amount of additional tax revenue, taxes that are going to come largely from the poor and middle class people who are uninsured and therefore might need those tax dollars to pay for medical care?
Do you love tax increases so much that you were willing to shut down government over it? OR did you just fail to realize that the CR actually fully funded Obamacare?
Respectfully,
Not even Ted Cruz wants to talk about that massive new set of taxes that comes with kenyacare.
Then their eyes glaze over and they change the channel.
I am a rino and I am glad the republicans did this.
Obamacare is the mother of all disasters that may very well sink the entire country.
We at least fought the good fight and if the democrats win, they own this disaster.
We at least fought the good fight and if the democrats win, they own this disaster.You might want to consider this before you get too optimistic...
Would you say that medicare, medicaid, social-security, defense procurement, or [insert govt spending program here] are -- any one or all of those examples -- clear successes as originally pitched -OR- are they all either plagued by tolerated fraud, mismanagement, bureaucratic red-tape, and administratively-uncontrollable cost over-runs?
The point being, we know that all of those programs are only deemed successes because the beneficiaries "get theirs" and as long as that happens, all the myriad problems are mostly disregarded, except for the most egregious cases -- usually due to a stupid criminal who got a bit too greedy and stumbled into the light of the public eye and finally *forced* an investigation.
There's no reason I can think of for 0bamacare to be any different. Once folks start getting their (ahem) "FREE-STUFF" from the govt, there is no level of program-defect or corruption & fraud that will kill the program. It is the very nature of "govt-entitlements". At the core, their generally acknowledged but unspoken purpose is to buy votes. And they are very, very, very effective at accomplishing that.
I wish I shared your optimism, but history precludes it. I can only hope that this program defies history and some subsequent congress puts a stop to the madness, but I doubt it will be *this* congress.
I for one am going to call this “Harry Reid’s” govt shutdown. Do to Reid what they did to Newt.
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