The Jig Is Up: ACA Sign-Up Is Democratic Organization for the 2014 Mid-Terms

You do realize that registering to vote is available as part of the process of signing up for the Affordable Care Act, and that realizing the coverage and support Democrats have made possible with the ACA while Republicans surreally voted dozens upon dozens of times to destroy Obamacare culminating in a pointless government shutdown over the issue means that those who register or who were already registered are confronting a real-time argument distinguishing the parties in a way that directly changes lives?

Republicans seem to think the shut-down debacle is behind them and that ongoing healthcare worries will be their ticket once again to gaining and keeping majorities in Congress. Republican lies may have played to the reactionary resentments and fears peddled over two generations of anti-governmental Movement Conservatism while the ACA's benefits were distant promises or occluded behind media overreaction to website glitches. But the tide is rapidly turning for the ACA and for the Democrats -- because real people are getting real benefits, more and more each and every day, and it's as true as it ever was that you can't fool all the people all the time. Between now and the mid-terms, Republicans are going to either deliver Democrats victories on immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship, on common sense gun safety regulations in the face of serial mass-shootings on tee vee, on food stamps and unemployment benefits for millions of family, friends, neighbors suffering through no fault of their own in this jobless recovery while refusing to vote for President Obama's Jobs Bill -- or they will obstruct these urgently necessary, immensely popular measures as the mid-terms grow nearer and nearer, all the while ACA realities trump the dark deluded fantasies on which the Republicans are pinning their desperate hopes.

I am not at all surprised that Republicans are freaking out as pop stars, sports heroes, comedians encourage young people to sign up for the ACA while at once reminding diversifying, urbanizing, secularizing Americans that our living culture is on the side of Democratic efforts and finds Republican lies and obstruction ridiculous. Karl Rove's reaction to a slick comedian's popular parody encouraging people to sign up for healthcare coverage is instructive (the parody as well as Rove's reaction are available below). Another full-on fulminating Election-Night spectacle of denialism seems to be barely contained behind his snide lies.

Getting young people health insurance is "generational warfare" he declares -- but Republican obstruction of the President's Jobs Bill in the face of an ongoing unemployment crisis that hits young people hardest, of course, that's not generational warfare, right, Turdblossom? Kinda like trying to get the richest of the rich to pay an income tax five percentage points higher than they do at present is "class warfare" -- but financial deregulation, looting and privatization of public assets and services, and the dismantlement of organized labor presiding historically unprecedented wealth concentration and class immobility, of course, that's not class warfare, right, Turdblossom?

Rove insists that Democrats "can't make the economic case" for the Affordable Care Act -- does he mean the elementary principle of cost/risk pooling on which all insurance depends? Does he mean the basic regulations in the ACA emphasizing preventive care, ballooning executive salaries, unnecessary procedures, marketing instead service provision to "bend the cost curve" which has made Americans pay more for less and worse health care than any other industrial nation for more than half a century? We all know who doesn't really have an argument to support his Neo-Confederate positions. We know who you are, Karl Rove. Even American memories are not that short. I daresay Republicans will need to know more than one woman with tattoos who won't be voting for Democrats if that organization of white racist reactionary plutocratic patriarchal pricks have a hope in hell of being a viable national party any time soon.