For years now, undeterred by an imposing level of conservative schadenfreude, a handful of us have argued that the introduction of Affordable Care Act benefits in January would flip the politics of Obamacare, and the GOP's repeal platform would collapse.

It's April now and that worm is turning before our eyes, both on on Capitol Hill and in states across the country.

Republicans have replaced an unabashed "full repeal!" mantra with a deluge of weasel words meant to conceal the fact that "repeal" is still the beginning and end of their health-care reform agenda. It's still the goal—they're just a little ashamed of it now. And that places an onus on Dems (and reporters and anyone else who believes politicians should own the consequences of their policies) to be extremely explicit about the benefits Obamacare is conferring, and what an unvarnished rendering of GOP health policy would really look like.

As Greg Sargent has been documenting over at The Washington Post, the ACA's optional Medicaid expansion is wrong-footing Republican Senate candidates in expansion states like Arkansas, Michigan, and New Hampshire, because their position (repeal) now entails kicking tens or hundreds of thousands of people in their states off of Medicaid.

Rather than own up to that, Representative Tom Cotton, the Republican who's challenging incumbent Senator Mark Pryor in Arkansas, served up the following word salad: "We would repeal Obamacare and replace it entirely with many reforms for our health care program…. We want every Arkansan, we want every American, to have quality, affordable access to health care."