GOP operatives say the party will use the issue against Democrats in the midterms. | AP Photos Both parties cherry-pick CBO report

Know what you get when you dump a complicated Congressional Budget Office report in politicians’ laps that mentions “Obamacare” and “jobs”?

Food fights. Wild, sloppy charges that don’t capture what the report actually said. And cherry picking. Lots and lots of cherry picking.


As the dust is finally settling on the CBO report released Tuesday, the two parties are also finally settling on their talking points going forward - and both still maintain vastly different portraits of the same document, depictions non-partisan analysts say are misleading, at best.

( WATCH: John Boehner on CBO Obamacare report)

“What bothers me in the debate is that people are just cherry picking what they want to use,” said Austin Frakt, a health economist at Boston University.

Republicans are quietly accepting that the report was largely about people working less and making that choice on their own, not literally about “2 million lost jobs.”

But that doesn’t mean the GOP has gone off the offensive. Republicans and conservative critics are already shifting to a more general argument: Even if it is just people working less, there’s no way that can be good for the economy, especially if it’s because they lose Obamacare subsidies if their income goes up.

The White House and Democrats say they’re happy to argue that point — because in their view, it’s much better for Americans, and the economy, if they can switch jobs or start businesses without having to worry about losing their health insurance. They’re even saying, no, no, Obamacare is good for jobs, because it puts money in people’s pockets and that increases the demand for goods and services.

( WATCH: Healthcare.gov ad: Hey kids, your mom wants you to sign up for Obamacare)

So even after days of debate and analysis and fact-checking by the media, we’re still in for lots more cherry picking as long as there’s any argument to be had about Obamacare and jobs. But if there’s one bottom line to the report, it’s this: It has become much harder for the administration to make the case that the Affordable Care Act has no negative impact on employment at all.

At the very least, Republicans and conservatives believe Obama can no longer make remarks like his comment in September that repealing the health care law is “not an agenda for economic growth. You’re not going to meet an economist who says that that’s the number-one priority in terms of boosting growth and jobs in this country, at least not a serious economist.”

The GOP believes it can keep hammering Obamacare on economic grounds, saying it’s not going to help growth if it discourages work in any way. Some Republicans are subtly shifting gears, though, from the “lost jobs” talking points that got blasted around on Tuesday — and became the focus of the first round of media stories — to the more general “Obamacare discourages work” argument.

( Also on POLITICO: Poll: 51% disapprove of Obamacare)

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s first statement on the report, for example, said it proves the health care law “will push 2.3 million people out of the workforce” — the same way most of the rest of the GOP was framing it. By the next day, at a hearing on the report, he went out of his way to clarify that that’s not really what the report meant.

“So just to understand this, it’s not that employers are laying people off, it’s that people aren’t working in the workforce, aren’t supplying labor to the effect of 2 and half million jobs in 2024, and as a result that lower workforce participation rate, that less labor supplied, lowers economic growth?” he asked CBO director Doug Elmendorf.

Some influential conservatives are cautioning the GOP to be careful, too. Writing in POLITICO magazine, National Review editor Rich Lowry noted that “we aren’t talking about jobs that are eliminated in the usual sense of discouraging employers from hiring, as some Republican talking points suggested.”

( Also on POLITICO: White House pushes back hard amid CBO fallout)

That doesn’t take the issue off the table. Top Republican operatives say it’s still going to be an explosive issue in the elections — because, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee declared in a blast email, the report “undercuts one of the main reasons that Democrats insisted they forced the unpopular measure into law - that it would be a boon for the economy and create jobs.”

The issue is still very much alive — but it’s “important to use accurate descriptions of what CBO said,” said NRSC spokesman Brad Dayspring.

The White House and Democrats aren’t ready to concede that ground. They’re circulating a key piece of testimony: At the House Budget Committee hearing on the report, Elmendorf said the health care law “spurs employment and would reduce unemployment over the next few years.” That statement, first reported by the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, was a response to a question from ranking Democrat Chris Van Hollen, who noted that the report says the health care law will boost the demand for goods and services because low-income people will have more money to spend.

The lesson, the White House says, is that Obamacare is actually good for jobs. “The ACA is thus – today – helping ensure that every American who wants a job can find one,” Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

The reality, though, is that there’s plenty of fodder for both sides’ arguments in the CBO report, which is why independent economists are rolling their eyes at how both parties are pulling out the parts they like the best.

Yes, the report says the impact “will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked … rather than as an increase in unemployment.” It also says some people will work less because the phaseout of their Obamacare subsidies makes work “less attractive” for some people, or because the subsidies will help them keep the same standard of living without working as much.

“If they’re leaving [a job] because that’s really what they want to do … that’s kind of good, right? That’s freedom. That’s what they want,” said Frakt. “[But] you can’t deny that there are taxes, and these weird cliffs in income, and all of these things.”

Some independent economists aren’t ready to join CBO in predicting the same impact on employment. The report’s point was that, if you add up all of the reductions in hours worked, it would be roughly equal to 2 million fewer jobs. But there’s enough uncertainty about other variables that Mark Zandi, the respected economist at Moody’s Analytics, says he’s not ready to work Obamacare into his own economic forecasts.

“Given the economic uncertainties, I would conclude that there is no net macroeconomic impact from this legislation,” said Zandi. “At times there are more negatives, and at times there are more positives.”

Other economists, however, have a more blunt reaction to the CBO report: Of course Obamacare affects employment. Given the fact that it offers subsidies to help low and middle-income people buy health insurance — and then phases them out when their income rises above a certain point — there’s no way it could not have an impact.

“I don’t think it was really a surprise,” said Mark Pauly, a health economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The only ways to expand health coverage with no impact on work efforts, Pauly said, would have been to have no subsidies at all — which would have been “politically impossible” in a law that requires most people to have health insurance — or have a “Medicare for all” program with enormous taxes to pay for it.

“You just have to say, ‘those are the breaks,’” said Pauly.

The subject is so loaded that CBO officials — both in the report and in the congressional testimony — tried desperately to cling to a middle-of-the-road, “good news-bad news” approach. But it’s hard to stick to that when both parties are ready to pounce at the findings that fit their own storylines.

In his testimony, Elmendorf said that “by providing heavily subsidized health insurance to people with very low income and then withdrawing those subsidies as income rises, the act creates a disincentive for people to work—relative to what would have been the case in the absence of that act.” At the same time, he said, those subsidies do help — they “make those lower-income people better off.”

But that’s the part where Republicans like Ryan say the law collides with an important goal: encouraging a work ethic and upward mobility.

“I understand the better off in the context of health care. But better off in inducing the person not to work who was on the low-income scale, not to get on the ladder of life, to begin working, getting the dignity of work, getting more opportunities, rising their income, joining the middle class, this means fewer people will do that,” Ryan said. “That’s why I am troubled by this.”

Administration officials aren’t convinced that’s a winning argument for Republicans, though. They think it has a good chance of sounding insulting — because voters won’t like to be told they don’t have a work ethic.

They also don’t think the Republicans can sustain an argument that people should be outraged if working parents cut back a bit so they can spend more time with their kids, or older people can retire a bit earlier.

Even some conservative writers warn that Republicans shouldn’t dismiss the importance of ending “job lock,” where people feel stuck in a job just because they need the health coverage. “Republicans have been arguing for years that the hard linkage between employment and health insurance is a mistake … And Republicans have been offering ways to fix the problem for years,” Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review. “There’s no point in suddenly shouting that ‘job-lock’ isn’t a problem.”

Once again, though, that’s only one side of a complicated CBO report — and it may not be enough to win the argument.

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing if people don’t want to work in the jobs they have, or rearrange their work hours to fit their lives better,” said Zandi. “[But] I don’t know that it’s necessarily a good thing if lower income people pull back on their work hours because they’re about to hit a point where they lose their health subsidies.”