Your Speculatroners knew that we'd be leading off our wrap-up of this week in the 2012 campaign with a discussion of the Supreme Court's ruling on health care reform, an analysis of the fallout from it and the way it will reshape the race. Of course, like just about everyone else, we were all but primed to expect the Roberts Court to strike down, at the very least, the individual mandate, if not the law in its entirety. Obviously, that didn't happen. But the decision that was rendered, nevertheless, alters the landscape in significant ways -- ways that are perhaps more interesting than had the law been sent to the dustbin.
Obviously, the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision more or less upholds the status quo. There are some interesting wrinkles to come in the way this tax on "free riders" will be implemented, and in the states' ongoing bargaining over Medicare. But, on balance, those Americans who stood to benefit from the protections of the law remain on the path to those benefits.
And the maintenance of the status quo will continue to present the same challenges for Team Obama Re-Elect. It's getting a little repetitive to keep pointing this out, but we'll mention it again: polls on the entirety of "Obamacare" tend to run against President Barack Obama. At the same time, polls on the component parts of the bill tend to be broadly favored by the public. If it seems like a strange disconnect, let's remember that the Affordable Care Act's greatest problem is that too few people know what it does. This is a phenomenon that was well-captured by The New Republic's Alec MacGillis, who traveled to a free clinic in Tennessee and met many people who did not even know that there was a law out there from which they stood to benefit.
Of course, if you listen to Mark Halperin -- which you should stop doing! -- you might be convinced that the worst thing that could have happened to Obama is for the Supreme Court to leave his law in place. This is, to our estimation, a hot load of bovine alimentary leavings. There's no benefit, whatsoever, to having your signature legislative victory incinerated by the Supreme Court. This is just the Beltway media indulging themselves in the game of counter-intuition -- a classic trope of political pundits who are always playing that game of "clever-clever" one-upsmanship that ends up pointlessly mystifying the political process. As Jeffrey Toobin remarked: "In...politics and the rest of life, it’s always better to win than lose. Winners win, and losers lose." Does Obama have a challenging path to re-election? Absolutely. But it's much harder withour the Affordable Care Act.
And the easiest way of explicating that fact is to remember what might have been if the SCOTUS had thrown out the law. That would have placed both Obama and Romney on the hook for answering the question, "So what are you going to do now?" Obama doesn't need to answer that anymore. He can spend the rest of the campaign making up for "Obamacare's" polling deficits. From his standpoint, it's a luxury. Romney, on the other hand, is still on the hook.
This is not to say that Romney doesn't extract some advantage from the Supreme Court ruling. If you're a voter who hates the Affordable Care Act but was waffling on whether to turn out for Mitt, given his long history of deviating from the conservative norm, you've got no choice now but to support Romney with full throat or open heart. It's the only scenario that gets the Affordable Care Act repealed.
And while the Supreme Court wrecked the chances of tossing Obamacare by the boards, there was still a reward that the GOP could extract from the wreckage -- it can now hammer down on the "mandate-is-actually-a-tax" issue, and contend that Obama's health care reform breaks a 2008 campaign promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. This is a message that Romney has already started to send. But it's not what he would have preferred -- in the days leading up to the court's decision, Romney clearly wanted to advance the idea that Obama had spent three years of his term working on something that was plainly unconstitutional.
Still, the simple fact of the matter is that Romney now faces the larger challenge. He's promised to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act. If he's elected, he'll obviously have the assistance of his GOP congressional colleagues who, by then, may have majorities (but, critically, not super-majorities) in the House and Senate. But for the time being, he is "repeal and replace's" only hope. And now, he'll have to map out a plan for both sides of that equation. (Assuming, that is, that reporters will hold Romney responsible for the replacement.) Those are the sorts of policy specifics that Romney has long labored to keep out of sight, for the obvious reason that once he exposes them, Team Obama Reelect can go on the attack.
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