WWRD: What Would Reagan Do (About Obamacare)?

The following is expansion on a comment I made on Allan Bourdius' radio show Monday night. On the topic of Ronald Reagan's gift for communication compared to the current crop of Republican representation, I have the following thoughts, which I have previously expressed in private conversations:

If Reagan were alive today, and were a leader in Congress, here would have been his approach to Obamacare: Knowing that there aren't enough votes in Congress to repeal it, and knowing that any complicated messaging attempt or legislative maneuvering will be distorted by the mainstream media and be used to hurt the party, and knowing that all the Republican party has is a single opportunity to message on this, Reagan would have done what he was best at: Crafting and delivering a message which resonates with the public, unifies the party, and is so bulletproof and simple that it couldn't be distorted by the press.

That message would have been something like this: "If Obamacare is so wonderful, why doesn't President Obama want to live under it himself? Why don't the members of Congress want to live with it? Why have the President's backers and donors gotten waivers from it? If President Obama thinks this is good enough for you and your family, why isn't it good enough for him and his family?"

In other words, tie funding the government to the Vitter amendment- which, in reality, came too little and too late.

That message is one which every Republican could get behind- it's a unifying message.

That message resonates with the public, who hate the fact that Congress "plays by a different set of rules than you and me".

That message is so simple that it leaves no room for media spin.

And as a aside, we couldn't have known in advance that the Obamacare website would be such a failure on Day One. However, if this had been our message, we could've pointed to the Obamacare website failure and said "That's why he doesn't want it for himself!".

(By the way, Allan posted this technical analysis of the website problems, and it is well worth reading)

Obama would look like an idiot. Every subsequent failure of Obamacare- which is, by the way, designed to fail- would hurt the President's approval more and more.

And when it does ultimately fail and the Democrats propose a single-payer health care system- which is the end goal of Obamacare- they'd be made a laughing stock.

Instead, we got the "defund" attempt- which accomplished nothing- and a government shutdown which has been hung on our necks. And instead of a unifying message, we've gotten divisiveness from the orchestrators of the "defund", accusing anyone on our side who thought it was bad strategy of being a "moderate", a "squish", a "RINO", and so on.

The conservative movement would do well to stop talking about Ronald Reagan so much, and start acting like him.