But pressing for total repeal may not be as simple as some Republicans believe. For one thing, even if they controlled the White House, the House and the Senate next year, Republicans would struggle to get 60 votes in the Senate to overturn the legislation. Are they prepared to spend months fighting over health care and leave themselves open to the charge that they weren’t paying attention to the economy — the same thing they said of Obama?
Ed Goeas, a GOP pollster, said before the ruling that it was important, in pressing for repeal, for Republicans to be cognizant of the fact that many of the law’s provisions are popular. “People strongly dislike Obamacare, but they’ve kind of forgotten why they don’t like it,” he said. “But they do remember what they do like.”
Democrats certainly saw the post-court politics differently. Now that the constitutional question has been resolved, they said, the president can focus on the provisions that people favor. “This fits the mood of the public,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said. “They want to keep what works and move on to fix what doesn’t.”
Whether that will work with independent voters, who have been more negative than positive in their assessments of the law, is the real question. Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said Obama still may have trouble changing public opinion about the health-care law, even with the Supreme Court on his side. “The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act pales, politically, beside the need . . . to make your case for reelection tethered to a program that remains widely unpopular,” he said.
For the time being, the court ruling put health-care reform back in the center of the political debate. Romney will no doubt make “repeal and replace” a continuing part of his message. But Romney’s team long has assumed that jobs and the economy will determine the outcome in November, and other Republicans said he should never lose his focus on that issue.
Ken Khachigian, a California-based Republican strategist, said the issue will have “zero influence” on the outcome of the election. “Romney would make a huge mistake if he allowed himself to be diverted from the core economic issues,” he said.
For Obama, the elation that he and his advisers may have felt Thursday could quickly dissipate if more bad economic news occurs. It is a long time until November, and the economy, domestically and internationally, remains extremely fragile.
“This is going to be the biggest week of the campaign,” Republican strategist Vin Weber said, referring to the court decision, “until we get to the June jobs report next week. The economy issue writ larger is going to be the dominant issue of the campaign.”
More than anything, the decision heightened and helped to clarify the choice for voters in November. Obama and Romney are offering a choice between the starkly different philosophies and sharply contrasting policy paths.
With the health-care law having survived largely intact in the courts, voters become the ultimate arbiters of which path and leader they prefer. The justices may have narrowly resolved the legal issues, but not the political divisions. As political scientist Merle Black of Emory University put it, “American politics just became even more divisive and polarized.”
For previous columns by Dan Balz, go to postpolitics.com.
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