Salon - "The right’s Virginia delusion: Somehow, a Democratic win is bad for Obamacare!"

[TomCADem]

The MSM has been working overtime to spin a Republican loss, where Republicans last won by a double digit margin, is somehow a loss for Democrats. Don't believe it.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/the_right_deludes_itself_about_virginia_no_a_democratic_win_is_not_bad_for_democrats_or_obamacare/

The truth: Cuccinelli's anti-women positions were far more disqualifying than McAuliffe's pro-healthcare stance

It was fun waking up this morning and witnessing the various ways Republicans across the spectrum are contorting themselves to argue that Obamacare was the one thing preventing Terry McAuliffe — World’s Most Likable Democrat™ — from winning an off-year landslide in a statewide race in Virginia.

Everything else is noise, but that Obamacare is the single greatest political liability to either party in the country! Some of the people repeating this mantra must know it’s silly, but are engaging in political psy-ops — hoping to spook Democrats, and trick them into fracturing over the issue or undermining the law.

But the phenomenon is also a twist on the question begging conservatives engage in to ward off all sources of ideological doubt. Conservatism can’t fail, it can only be failed. Republicans have invested too much in a scorched Earth campaign against the Affordable Care Act to acknowledge that their strategy is out of proportion to the law’s contentiousness. And as unrelenting hostility toward Obamacare has become a tenet of conservative orthodoxy, relenting somewhat would amount to more than simply confessing to strategic error. It would require conceding a failure of infallible conservatism. Thus anti-Obamacare absolutism can’t fail, it can only be failed. Arguing that Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat is bad news for Obamacare isn’t just psy-ops. For some, it’s a preservation instinct.

* * *
The truth is that if Obamacare were as bad as Republicans have convinced conservatives it is, McAuliffe probably would have lost. To understand why, imagine he’d run on a platform of secession, or imposing a broad-based state income tax hike with a 75 percent top marginal rate, or turning the Pentagon into a purple triangle and selling it to Pennsylvania at a discount. Be creative. Or if you want to be less absurd, imagine he’d run on a platform of getting an Obamacare exemption for Virginia by standing up a single-payer system in the state. Elections are driven by fundamentals, but you can imagine any number of parochial or national positions McAuliffe could have taken in the campaign that would have been disqualifying.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. The right are delusional (their brains aren't functioning)

[CTyankee]

2. Excellent piece! I'm coming back to this later today for a deeper read...