Dan Henninger has a nice piece on what ♡bamaCare!!! has done for the Democrat brand image:
Even liberal Democrats have begun to distance themselves from this legacy. Last May in Los Angeles of all places, Democrat Eric Garcetti defeated Wendy Greuel for mayor by turning her union endorsements into a liability.
But for decades most Democrats have been floating through this low-performance public milieu, where standards of any sort can be diluted, if not wholly ignored. The idea that the $824 billion stimulus was for “shovel-ready” projects has become a butt of the government joke circuit. This sloppy mindset outputted ObamaCare, by acclamation the party’s biggest product since Medicare. It looks like a Rube Goldberg machine.
The Rube Goldberg Democrats means that whether from laziness or arrogance, the party is now producing political contraptions that are monuments to inefficiency, incomprehension and unworkability. Before ObamaCare, it often went unnoticed. But the health-care law sits out in plain view, letting every voter connect the dots between political promise and nonperformance.
I’m not sure there’s been another kind of Democrat, at least not at the national level, since the New Deal. Bill Clinton might be remembered best for small initiatives and spending restraint, but that was after his own Rube Goldberg contraption, HillaryCare, fell apart on Capitol Hill. And spending restraint didn’t really become a thing until Speaker Gingrich and the GOP Congress.
The GOP’s brand image though, at least to those of us on the right, is to start with workable ideas and then abandon them.
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