Thomas Sowell rolls with a familiar Republican refrain:
Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for congressional Democrats and for the president himself. But that is far from certain.
True, President Obama’s approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the president will not be on the ballot until 2012.
They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health-care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health-care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats’ control of Congress. As an old song said, “It ain’t necessarily so.”
The voters will have had no experience with the actual, concrete effect of the government takeover of medical care at the time of either the 2010 congressional elections or the 2012 presidential election. All they will have will be conflicting rhetoric – and you can depend on the mainstream media to go along with the rhetoric of those who passed this medical-care bill….
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
We haven’t heard that before, have we? Of course, as Pat Buchanan points out, electing Republicans to the House and Senate can’t possibly make any positive difference because they’re only going to import more Democrat-voting immigrants anyhow.
In other words, the point of no return has already been passed. Obamacare isn’t a warning sign, it is an exclamation point.