Dissent within the president's own party could lead to revolt. Dem decision time: Fight or flight

A White House under siege. A signature policy initiative turning into an embarrassing public spectacle. Dissent within the president’s own party that threatens to turn into a full-blown revolt.

For Republicans, such a moment came in 2005, as the party faced a daunting midterm election under the shadow of the disastrous Iraq War and a presidency in the dumps. For Democrats, the fear now is that the Affordable Care Act’s clumsy rollout — complete with a botched enrollment website and a debunked presidential pledge that Americans could keep their existing insurance plans — could produce a similar rout at the ballot box, with candidates dragged down by President Barack Obama’s dropping job approval and dimming public perceptions of the law known as Obamacare.


On Wednesday, the administration announced that only 106,185 people had selected new health insurance policies through the Obamacare exchanges as of Nov. 2, falling below early White House hopes. And only a quarter of that figure stemmed from the HealthCare.gov website.

( Also on POLITICO: Obamacare: 10 numbers to know)

It’s utterly premature, Democrats insist, to assume that the ACA will be a millstone around the party’s neck in 2014. But going by the behavior of Democratic lawmakers, it’s plainly not too soon for the party to tackle this dilemma: how to create distance between a set of candidates and a president of the same party whose agenda is on the rocks.

The paradox for any party is this: Standing in lock step with an unpopular leader can only taint candidates in competitive races by association. But if too many candidates flee the president, it serves to amplify his unpopularity, with potentially deeper ramifications for the whole party.

So far, the Democratic approach to all the ACA bungling is to let a thousand Obamacare critics bloom. It’s not that Democratic candidates and officials are openly breaking ranks and calling for the law’s repeal — there’s still solid Democratic consensus that the ACA is mostly a good thing — but politicians across the party have claimed wide maneuvering room for themselves to wander away from the White House line and even directly rebuke the administration.

( PHOTOS: 10 Sebelius quotes about Obamacare website)

The political calculus is straightforward, Democrats say. Voters are uncomfortable with the ACA, but private polling shows they are receptive to a “mend it, don’t end it” message. If Democratic House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates can show they want to fix the law proactively, the party believes voters will forgive some bungling by the administration. And if some Democrats are inching away from the president in an awfully public fashion, lawmakers say they have felt little pressure from the White House and other party leaders to make the existing text of the ACA a political hill to fight and die on.

“This is not about loyalty to the White House. It’s about getting the health care law right for the American people,” said Vermont Rep. Peter Welch. “This is a situation where good implementation is good politics.”

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the former Democratic Party chairman, said there’s been “no pushback” on criticism of the HealthCare.gov website or components of the law not viewed as fundamental to health care reform.

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA)

“I know many of my colleagues, from the very beginning, feel like if it’s in the reform and improvement discussion, we’re all about it. If all you want to do is talk ‘replace or defund,’ that’s a very easy vote for us,” Kaine said.

Kaine’s fellow Virginian, Rep. Gerry Connolly, said he once drew “fairly mild” pushback from higher-ups on the Hill for some of his ACA criticism, but “that was the end of it.” “We’ve put a lot on the line, politically, and that we have so much at stake over technical glitches is extremely frustrating. Having said that, I think most Democrats don’t want to lose sight of the incredible corpus of reforms the law represents,” Connolly said.

The party’s frustration with the law’s rocky rollout has grown more intense and more public with each passing day: North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan demanded an investigation this week into the bungled HealthCare.gov website. Democratic Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, has called the ACA’s rocky launch “inexcusable.” Lawmakers have proposed alterations ranging from the modest — repealing the medical device tax — to the more invasive, like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s push to let Americans roll over all existing insurance plans into 2013.

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin hasn’t fired a bullet through the law yet — as he did in one 2010 campaign ad with a copy of Democratic climate change legislation — but he has introduced a measure to delay the individual mandate. One of the party’s most prized 2014 recruits, Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn, has endorsed Manchin’s approach.

For many Democrats, long irked by what they view as a half-decade of neglect from a distant president, the criticism comes naturally. For the same reason, it’s unclear whether the White House could muzzle its internal critics even if it tried — POLITICO reported Wednesday that a meeting between Obama advisers and the House Democratic Caucus turned hostile as members openly questioned whether the administration really grasps the scale of the ACA’s implementation problems.

Republicans, especially those who lived through the Iraq debate, view Democratic criticism of the ACA as a sign of greater disunity to come. During the George W. Bush years, Republicans maintained a much more rigid stance of public support for the White House than Democrats have so far in 2013. But they, too, stuck with their party leader on a matter of principle — a policy that they agreed was flawed but mostly good — and paid a grievous price for it in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Former New York Rep. Tom Reynolds, who helmed the House GOP campaign committee in 2006, said Democrats have a little more time to let the Obamacare debate play out before feeling acute pressure to flee from Obama or directly repudiate his eponymous health reform law. But that point may come, and soon, he predicted.

“Already, I think ‘mend it’ is a retreat from where they had been,” Reynolds said. “I think they can wait for a bit and if it doesn’t improve … it will be a time when I think members will begin to go it alone.”

Republican strategist Carl Forti, a former top National Republican Congressional Committee official, said he was surprised that more Democrats hadn’t abandoned ship already: “If I’m in Arkansas or Louisiana or North Carolina or Alaska, I’m running for the hills.”

Democrats counter that the flexibility their party has already shown around Obamacare is an illustration of why health care won’t turn into an Iraq-style political fiasco for them: Republicans maintained their lock step support for Bush’s policies well past the point that a stay-the-course message was politically viable. In a choice between digging in and changing approaches, voters had an obvious preference.

Democrats say that avoiding such a harsh binary choice is a driving reason behind their public criticism of the ACA. New York Rep. Steve Israel, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, outlined the party’s approach to talking about the law in a memo to his colleagues Wednesday, contrasting the “reckless Republican Congress” not with proud Obama Democrats — but with practical “problem-solvers” running in 2014.

“Republican leadership and rank-and-file members refuse to pass a budget that would guarantee no more government shutdowns by giving up on their demand to defund the Affordable Care Act,” Israel wrote, ticking off the names of eight new House challengers who have stepped up since the shutdown.

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a second-term Democrat, called it an “obligation” for Democrats to question the administration and said the party needs to be “open to changing [the ACA] so it meets the expectations of people in difficult circumstances.”

Casey said even the Democrats’ current stance might change if the White House can’t fix the enrollment website by month’s end, as it has pledged to do: “I might have a different approach after Nov. 30 depending on whether they can meet that deadline or not.”

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