Conservative columnist John Podhoretz wrote in a New York Post op-ed published Wednesday that Republican lawmakers are doing “significant damage” to their party’s already tarnished reputation by assuming the American public supports their campaign against Obamacare.
Podhoretz’s column, titled “Suicide of the Right,” points out that poll numbers showing Americans disapprove of Obamacare, combined with the data point that twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative rather than liberal, have incorrectly led the GOP to assume a “silent majority” backs their strategy.
From the op-ed:
If ObamaCare had been as unpopular as conservatives believed, their plan for the shutdown — that there would be a public uprising to force Democratic senators in close races in 2014 to defund it — would’ve worked. It didn’t. Not a single senator budged.
Their tactic failed, and now what they are left with is House Speaker John Boehner basically begging the president of the United States to negotiate with him.
One thing we know for sure is that it’s not an equal fight, this fight between a man who received 65 million votes nationwide and a man who received 246,000 votes in one congressional district in Ohio.
