Why Sink sank

As Paul suspected, Obamacare seems to have had something to do with the sinking of Democrat Alex Sink in the special election for representation of Florida’s 13th congressional district yesterday. Byron York doesn’t have much more than a suspicion either, but he takes a look back at the candidates’ debate last month and reports:

[O]ne thing was clear from that debate, and it was that Sink didn’t have much to say about Obamacare. She defended the law and adopted the widely-used Democratic line that the president’s health care law should be “fixed.” But, like many other Democrats around the country, she had few actual ideas about how to fix it.

When Jolly asked Sink what she would do to fix Obamacare, Sink had two proposals. She would allow the government to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices for Medicare, and she would repeal the medical device tax — neither of which would address the problems Obamacare has created for millions of Americans. Sink said there were many other fix-it ideas she could have discussed, but she did not say what there were. And her website’s issues page included a section headlined, “Improving the Affordable Care Act: Keep the Good, Fix the Bad,” but did not suggest any ways to do so.

“The rollout of the website and problems that have arisen with the implementation are unacceptable,” Sink’s website said. “The Obama administration needs to be held accountable to get the website running, and making any necessary changes to fix any problems with the law. If these changes cannot be made in a timely way, then components of the law should be delayed until these issues are addressed.”

Too much of nothing, Ms. Sink. Byron enters this reservation:

It’s not clear whether Sink’s weak defense of Obamacare was the key factor, or even a significant factor, in her loss. Political reporters sometimes make too much of national issues in special elections. But there’s no doubt that Sink’s campaign showed the difficulties of the Democrats’ defense of Obamacare. They have to say they want to fix the program because almost nobody (a bare eight percent in the latest Kaiser Foundation survey) wants to keep the law as is.

I think it’s fair to surmise that the peasants are revolting, and National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar supplies a bit more evidence to support the proposition here.

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