House Health Care, Recent & Next Year's Elections

Kim Strassel wrote an interesting column last Friday in the Wall Street Journal.

With the advantage of hindsight, she parsed the voting results in three Virginia House districts which were lost by Republicans last November.

All three districts went for the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Bob McDonnell, by overwhelming majorities, significantly improving margins on John McCain's performance last November. Strassel described the pressure these Democratic freshman Representatives are now under by emboldened GOP challengers for next year's election.

She then tied this backlash of last week to the then-imminent, now passed Frisco Nan House health care bill.

In a telling quote, Strassel declared,

"The Obama presidency was always a race against time."

She wrote of the vote coming in advance of members being influenced against supporting it over the Veteran's Day recess. But, as I noted in this post, it may well be better for them to suffer the furies of voters after the passage of the unreconciled bill. Because they'll have an earful now, and at Christmas, before a marked-up, reconciled version returns from the Senate. And that may not even occur until the Spring thaw.

Never the less, Strassel's observation highlights the coming race between voter outrage, the Democratically-controlled Congress' attempts to enact extremely liberal social legislation, and the first opportunity for voters to hand Wonderboy a defeat at the polls next November.

She characterizes Nan's brazen tactics as putting the Congressional Democrats at a tipping point already, citing Wonderboy's falling poll numbers and their likely impact on wary, fearful Democratic Representatives in those vulnerable districts.