THE REPEAL AGENDA

It's been nearly a month since the passage of ObamaCare, so now is a good time to check in on the staying power of the campaign to repeal it.

So far—and it is still early—the news on that front is good. Republican leaders continue to embrace repeal of the health-care bill as a centerpiece of their agenda.

For the Republicans, this is not just a potentially popular issue which will help them gain back control of Congress and possibly even the White House. It is a matter of ideological life and death for the party. If they don't repeal ObamaCare, they are doomed forever to be mere tax collectors and administrators of the welfare state, as Paul Ryan has memorably put it. Those are terms on which the Republican Party cannot survive politically, because it could only offer a weak echo of the policies of the left.

Fortunately, National Review Online reports that a large number of Republican congressmen and would-be congressmen have pledged to repeal the health care bill.

Back in mid-January, well before the House of Representatives approved ObamaCare, the free-market Club for Growth (CFG) began asking federal lawmakers, candidates, and ordinary citizens to pledge their support for a repeal-and-replace strategy. As of Thursday afternoon, 67 incumbent House and Senate members had signed the CFG's online "Repeal It" pledge, along with 287 official candidates. None of them are Democrats (no surprise there), but the Republican signatories include moderates and conservatives alike.

Similarly, Kyle Trygstad at RealClearPolitics reports from the Southern Republican Leadership Conference that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal—one of the party's rising young stars—declared that "'This is no time to be timid. We must repeal this bill." Trygstad continues: "Speakers here…have all criticized the legislation, and if the activist audience's reception is any indication, this will be the No. 1 rallying point in the fall elections."

House Minority Leader John Boehner—who will become Speaker of the House if Republicans regain control—echoes that sentiment, telling a radio show that "repealing this bill has to be our No. 1 priority."

Of course, Republicans would not be so eager to embrace this campaign if they didn't think they could win with it at the polls. Fortunately, the American people so far show little propensity to change their minds on ObamaCare, with the polls showing no bounce in approval for the bill. In fact, the RealClearPolitics average of health-care polls still shows strong opposition.

The polls also show a continued decline for President Obama. A few weeks ago, his poll numbers briefly inverted—for the first time, more people disapproved of his performance than approved—but his approval bounced back up again, probably because of an improvement among leftists who had been disappointed at his failure to push the bill through earlier. But now his numbers are inverted again, and the inversion looks strong enough to be a lasting trend.

Will the public approve of the health care bill once it comes into effect? Probably not, given the giant disaster that the bill will inevitably cause. An excellent article in Fortune describes how two key provisions of the bill—"guaranteed issue" and "community rating"—constitute "time bombs" that will reduce people's health insurance choices will driving prices up dramatically.

A week ago, a good friend—let's call him Anthony—related a remarkable story about shopping for health insurance in two states, New York and Arizona.

For Anthony and millions of other consumers, New York represents the ultimate nightmare for finding affordable coverage, pairing outrageously high prices with a tiny roster of offerings. By contrast, Anthony found fabulous bargains and a rich variety of policies in Arizona's desert sun.

So it would be wonderful for folks like Anthony if the historic health-care reform law scuttled the rules that created the disaster in New York, and made America's insurance markets a lot more like Arizona's.

But amazingly, the bill imposes a New York-style regime on the rest of the nation, then makes a gigantic bet that the results won't mimic those of the Empire State.

If only someone had explained that before the health care vote. Oh wait, we did.

Perversely, the only real danger to the crusade for repeal is that the economy could recover too quickly. Larry Kudlow is already proclaiming that we're in a sharp "V-shaped" recovery. Of course, there is a strong chance that we could end up with a "W," as new taxes and the bankrupting of the federal budget drag us down into a second recession, a "double dip." But by the normal political calculations, people vote according to the state of the economy, so a recovery this year—which would be welcome to each of us personally—ought to hurt the chances for a Republican victory and take the fire out of opposition to the administration.

But I'm not at all certain that this conventional wisdom will hold, because opposition to the Obama administration is not just about the state of the economy. The tea parties are not a horde of the ignorant unemployed. What is really driving this political movement is the issue of the people's basic relationship to government. The issue is whether we are all willing to live as dependents on government or whether we want to be independent. It's about the "tipping point" at which we go from being a basically free society to a basically unfree one.

That's the ideological case that we have to keep pressing, to ensure that the people remain opposed to Obama's agenda even if the economy temporarily bounces back.—RWT

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal."