US Healthcare: Conservative Pundit: Obamacare May Destroy GOP -- by Jonathan Chait

Conservatives who loathe or fear Donald Trump have a tendency to depict the Republican front-runner as a reflection not of the party whose heart he is winning but the party that loathes him uniformly. To the burgeoning genre of conservative analyses attributing Trump’s rise to things conservatives already hate, National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar adds the passage of Obamacare:

Ima­gine, for a mo­ment, the state of the 2010 midterms without Obama­care in the equa­tion. Re­pub­lic­ans would have run against the stag­nant state of the eco­nomy with some suc­cess.

But without the gal­van­iz­ing op­pos­i­tion to Obama’s health care law—Re­pub­lic­ans net­ted a whop­ping 63 House seats that year—Demo­crats would likely have nar­rowly kept con­trol of Con­gress, and con­tin­ued to press for­ward with Obama’s agenda.

There would be tea-party-aligned Re­pub­lic­ans elec­ted, but ab­sent the wave, not enough to form the con­cer­ted op­pos­i­tion that emerged.  …

With in­tensi­fy­ing en­ergy on the Right, the biggest polit­ic­al threat to mem­bers emerged from with­in their own party, and they ad­ap­ted ac­cord­ingly.

Long story short, by shepherding a major social reform that has cut the uninsured rate in half while coming in well below its projected costs and bringing health-care inflation down to its lowest rate in recorded history, Obama angered Republicans, forcing them to nominate an ignorant, bigoted clown.

Read more: Conservative Pundit: Obamacare May Destroy GOP -- NYMag