Does it seem to anyone else like Democrats — including the President — passed the Affordable Care Act and then promptly stopped talking about it altogether? If my read on the situation is right, that’s because they perceived the law polls very poorly. But

1. If you’re going to lose an election, lose with your back straight. Either voters dislike your voting for the law or they don’t. If they don’t care how you voted, there’s no need for you to be silent about it. On the other hand, if they dislike it, and you believed in the law when you passed it, then stand up for it. You didn’t run for office just to win re-election; presumably you ran because you wanted to achieve something positive, and you thought the law was positive. If the voters do care and you didn’t believe in it when it was passed, your opponent is still going to hound you for your vote when you run for re-election. So what’s the point in hiding from it?

2. Whether something polls well or poorly isn’t an objective fact ‘out there’ in the universe; whether it polls well depends a lot on whether people whom Americans like — such as President Obama — are out there selling it. Which they aren’t.

3. The ACA as such polls poorly, because it’s been demonized as ‘Obamacare’. But some of the individual provisions — no discrimination against pre-existing conditions, lengthened coverage under one’s parents’ health insurance — poll well. In many cases I think it’s just that people don’t know what’s in Obamacare. In other cases, like the mandate, people genuinely seem to hate it. That seems like a failure of education: people need to understand that there are only a few ways to make health coverage universal without the market unraveling. Democrats have been terrible about selling the mandate.

4. Do you care about ensuring that everyone has health insurance, or don’t you? We really need to make clear that that’s what this comes down to: we believe in universal coverage; they don’t. If you believe in universal coverage, something like a mandate is unavoidable. (Expanding Medicare to everyone would have been another option, but insurers never would have stood for it.) Lately Republicans seem to be facing up to this, and at least admitting that they don’t care about universal coverage. If nothing else, that has the virtue of consistency. But it’s morally repugnant.

This is really out of my butt, but I do wonder:

• A lot of couples would really like to split the childcare more evenly.
• It would really be ideal, toward that end, if both members of the partnership could work part-time and take care of the kids the other part of the time.
• But there’s very little meaningful part-time work in this country.
• Part-time work is made even less of an option because health insurance largely only goes to full-time employees.
• But under health reform, you’ll be able to get health insurance through an exchange, if your employer doesn’t offer it to you. (Note to self: look up the details of who’s eligible to buy on the exchanges.)
• So some couples won’t need to send one partner into full-time work, because they’ll be able to get health-insurance with only part-time labor.

Obviously this isn’t a full solution, and obviously there are benefits to full-time labor that part-time labor still won’t be able to match. But at the margin, at least, I suspect this will lead more than a few couples to split the childcare. Which is a good thing.

“I Reject Affordable Health Care For All Americans … AND I VOTE.”

If this health-care-reform thing happens, people will find Reasons Why It Happened. Look at what happened when Scott Brown won in Massachusetts: people tried to look for a Large Trend or whatever that explained why the Republicans were taking over. Brown won with 52% of the vote — certainly a solid lead, but not exactly a landslide. Many things could have caused a three-percent swing in votes. Coakley could have been a better candidate, for instance. But once Brown won, journalists had to opine on What It All Means — because it had to Mean Something.

Now here we are on the eve of what looks like the greatest progressive victory since Medicare. I, for one, am incredibly excited. I’m excited both because 32 million of the least fortunate Americans will have a safety net beneath them that’s a bit stronger; and because I hope that this will energize progressives toward future victories.

So now the press will have to come up with explanations. Health reform succeeded because Nancy Pelosi is one of the greatest Speaker in House history, for instance. The Republicans failed because the Tea Party movement, while important, was ragtag and ill-focused. Etc.

But we were all alive over the last year. We saw where this could have failed any number of times. It could have failed if House Democrats had fallen apart after Scott Brown’s victory, as it looked like they would. It could have failed last summer if the Tea Party thing had freaked people out more than it did. Had it failed at any of those moments, the press would be looking for reasons. Nancy Pelosi would still be the Speaker, but now she’d be the worst Speaker in House history — squandering a massive lead, etc., etc. Flip a few Congressmen the other way, and suddenly the narrative changes massively.

I’m not saying that this victory — should it happen — is entirely arbitrary; of course it’s not. What I am saying is that, if it were as inevitable and foreordained as the narrative will make it out to be, then no one would have panicked over the last year.

I like simple explanations as much as anyone else. I like, for instance, the Larry Bartels model that predicts presidential elections on the basis of macroeconomic factors like the unemployment rate. So far as I know, there’s no such model predicting victory in this health-reform debate. The only explanations that people can advance are post-facto ones.

Which doesn’t bother me a bit, in this case. My side looks like it’s going to win. (If it doesn’t, I will do the appropriate amount of crow-eating.) If this will have any effects, they will be positive effects for my side. Victory is like that.

What I’m curious about is how long-lasting the effects of a victory — any victory of this magnitude — are. It’ll help us, but for how long?

What would people like to attack after this? Financial-system reform?

Via Matt Yglesias’s Twitter feed: a really disgusting round of conservative class-baiting, mocking those who lack insurance and suffer as a result.

It’s really quite simple, and it’s really been quite simple for at least this past year: there are those who care about protecting the uninsured, and there are those who don’t. There are those who think it’s a problem that 30 million or more Americans suffer and die needlessly, and there are those who don’t. If you see it as a problem, you search for ways to solve it; if you don’t, you don’t.

Of course there are those who believe that government just cannot solve the problem. But these folks have proposed remarkably thin gruel in response; e.g., the Republican “plan” that will only cover 3 million people. The only reasonable conclusion is that Republicans don’t think there’s an actual problem.

If they could come right and say that they don’t care about the uninsured, at least we’d have some honesty. But they know that Americans want health coverage for their uninsured countrymen. So they have to come up with “solutions” that don’t actually solve anything and cost very little. Health insurance, in this mode, is about marketing rather than solving problems: Republicans can continue to market themselves as the party of fiscal discipline and mock Democrats as “tax and spend”, all without actually doing anything.

So again, the choice is simple: either you think it’s a problem that tens of millions of your fellow-Americans lack insurance and can go bankrupt just by getting sick, or you don’t. If you do, there’s one political party that’s trying to solve it, and one that views the uninsured as a marketing tool. If you believe that the uninsured are a problem, but you have problems with the Democrats’ plans, do all you can to fix those plans. Don’t look to Republicans for a solution, because all they have to offer is empty sloganeering.