We’ve known about this theory for a while now.  The Democrats aren’t interested in short-term electoral losses over Obamacare because they want to create a new entitlement.  If they succeed, it’s a whole new majority-sized culture of dependency voting for Democrats year in and out for their subsistence-level piece of the pie.  It’s so very over if that occurs, or so the theory goes.

However, that presumes the only option is repeal, and that’s not remotely true.  Not only that, but their leaders couldn’t predict the resistance occurring today.  Do the Democrats think that someone like Pelosi has a better grasp of the future than the present?  Do they really want to take her word for it when she says it’s just going to be a replay of history to their favor?

They think they’re playing the long game with Obamacare.  Fine.  How about a look into an alternative crystal ball instead?  Let’s look a few moves ahead then and see what could happen next.

• The bill passes, and it goes to court.  As the individual mandate applies to everyone in the country, everyone in the country has standing to challenge it.  It’s all but certain that someone will, and if that happens, two things occur.  This nightmare stays in the news through the election cycle, and if it’s repealed, the Democrats threw their majorities away for nothing.  I hope they’re feeling lucky, because this is a high-stakes bet.
• Failing that, the Republicans retake the House and Senate and find they can’t repeal it because of Obama.  Fortunately, that’s not all they can do.  They can defund it, which means everyone implementing all the new bureaucracies it creates will be working for free.  I don’t see those oh-so-charitable bureaucrats doing that for long.
• They don’t have to repeal it all at once.  They can do it piecemeal by attaching partial repeals to bills that will force an opposition president to make impossible choices.  Clinton might have been able to spin his way out of those sorts of problems, but he was one of the few.  If they’re doing this with Obama, the Democrats are in trouble.
• Don’t think the Republicans have the nerve?  In the past, certainly.  Nowadays, we have that pesky thing called a Tea Party movement.  It’s constituted of righteously indignant and, more importantly, unforgiving people who’ve demonstrated the ability to get candidates elected or cost them their careers.  If the Republicans are insufficiently motivated (though they show signs of improvement on occasion), the kind of fear it takes to motivate them can be generated.
• The myth of the Democrat Moderate is destroyed for at least a generation.  Liberals account for somewhere between 20-25% of the electorate.  The rest of the country is center-right, and there’s no more deception now that Obamacare passed with all sixty Democrats and Dem-leaning Independents in the Senate voting for it.  So with a little work on the Republicans’ part (see the motivational technique mentioned above for encouraging them to do that sort of work), the argument becomes “the reasonable people vs. the nanny-state looney toons.”  Not a good one to try and win.
• Assuming nothing is done, America could go bankrupt.  The entitlement state evaporates like mist in the sun, and that whole “infuriate everyone” thing becomes ubiquitous.  All of the Democrats’ dependency groups, many of whom have life skills that can be summed up as “collect checks,” aren’t going to get along well under those kind of circumstances.  No one can predict what happens then beyond the obvious:  “It won’t be pretty.”
• Then there’s the elephant in the room.  The kind of system the Democrats would create here has been done before in other countries.  It can be summed up quite easily:  Pay More.  Get Less.  Wait Longer. For those who can opt out, it can also be described as There Is No More “Get More” And “Wait Less“.  The Congresstwits who vote for this bill may not have to live on the health care plan they create for everyone else, but they will have to live with the disaster they make of American medicine.  You can have all the money in the world, but if you decimate the medical system in America to third-world quality, there’s no first-rate care in the country left to buy, save for a few pockets here and there.  Costa Rica is a long way to fly if they or someone they know only has minutes to live, and might have done so had the care they helped to destroy still been around.

There’s no light at the end of this tunnel for the Democrats unless they kill the bill, and even then all they get is a better chance of political survival.  If not, they should hear the whistle of the train headed their way as all the things they didn’t consider before it was too late finally find them.  If they listen to their ideologues, they’ll be losing their jobs for nothing in the end.

By the way, they should really consider the ditch Pelosi plan again.  It’s not too late for a show of good faith to the American people…