We have Obamacare for one reason and one reason only: For a brief, ghoulish period in recent history, Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

We don’t have Obamacare because the public was clamoring for it. We have it because Republicans lost elections.

First, Republicans lost their majorities in the House and the Senate in 2006, thanks to George W. Bush’s highly effective “Keep the Base at Home on Election Day” campaign, which consisted of pushing amnesty for illegal aliens.

Then in 2008, Republicans had the bright idea to run crazy-eyed crypt-keeper John McCain for president.

McCain supported: amnesty (until he needed our votes), retroactive Social Security benefits for illegal aliens, free speech-crushing campaign-finance laws, crackpot global warming legislation, criminal trials for terrorists and stem-cell research on human embryos.

He opposed: the Bush tax cuts, a marriage amendment to the Constitution, waterboarding terrorists and drilling in Alaska. Oh, also, he called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth “dishonest and dishonorable.” (As suggested by the subtitle, all this is covered in Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican )

As a consequence, Democrats won the presidency, as well as huge majorities in Congress. The last time Democrats had controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate was 16 years earlier, back in 1993. Remember what they did back then? The very first thing? (No, Clinton masturbating on an intern came later.) That’s right: They tried to pass Hillarycare.

Hillarycare went down in humiliating defeat, and the Democrats had to wait nearly two decades for the stars to be perfectly aligned again. Then, the very next time they had the presidency, the House and Senate, they went right back to national health care. (Notice that, in neither instance, was public opinion involved.)

If an alien landed and asked why America has Obamacare when most people hate it, we’d have to say: Because the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate.

The Democrats’ policy is: We vote and vote and vote, until it finally comes out their way, then we never vote again. (This, too, is detailed in Never Trust a Liberal Over Three ) That’s why the moment this greased-through, widely detested law was enacted, liberals began hailing it as the “law of the land.” How dare you question “settled law”? Are you unpatriotic?

Democrats would never have been in a position to pass Obamacare if both sides of the Republican Party hadn’t helped them win elections. The establishment Republicans screwed over our party with their greed, incompetence and lassitude, and the conservative purists screwed our party by running candidates who could not possibly win.

True, the tea party also gave us the majestic Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, among a few other improvements. But was Dick Lugar really the biggest problem in the U.S. Senate? Wasn’t Claire McCaskill a bigger problem?

And why are so many conservatives today burbling about the alleged deficiencies of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell — while ignoring the actual crimes of Democratic senators like Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, Mark Pryor from Arkansas and Mark Begich from Alaska?

All those Democrats voted for Obamacare — and they’re all up for election next year in states that could easily go Republican. If any one of these senators had voted “no” on Obamacare, it would not be law.

By contrast, McConnell not only voted against Obamacare, but presided over a Senate minority in which every single Republican voted against Obamacare, even that idiot McCain. Kentucky only seems like a red state because McConnell keeps winning elections there: It went for Clinton twice and has had a solid run of Democratic governors since 1947, interrupted by one-term Republican governors only twice in 66 years.

But McConnell is in hot water with Kentucky’s “9/12 Project” — a group with enough marketing savvy to have a name that no one understands.

The project’s executive director, Eric Wilson, is hopping mad with McConnell because, when given a choice between raising taxes on all Americans or raising taxes only on those individuals making more than $400,000 a year, he chose to raise taxes only on the high earners.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be a purist, denouncing everyone else as a sellout and hack, while other people do the hard work of getting elected and preventing even rotten Republicans from voting for Obamacare. You want McConnell to stop all tax hikes? Give him a majority in the Senate.

Al Franken’s Senate seat is another one that should be on Republicans’ radar. He stole the 2008 election in Minnesota, going from a thousand votes down the day after the election to 300 votes up a few months later, after vast numbers of Franken votes kept being discovered in heavily Democratic districts. As economist John Lott pointed out at the time, the magical appearance of hundreds of new votes for Franken was a statistical impossibility.

Obamacare could not have passed without the Democrats’ prodigious vote theft in Franken’s 2008 election. But if the Republican candidate had won, some conservatives would now be trying to take out moderate Republican Norm Coleman for being a “RINO.” The far-left Democrat won, so conservatives can’t be bothered to find someone to beat him.

The inability to distinguish Coleman and McConnell — and whomever else the conservative purists have in their maw — from Obamacare-ratifying Democrats is as insane as the left’s inability to distinguish Saddam’s rape rooms from the shortage of female CEOs in the U.S. Three and a half years after Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote, anyone who can’t see a difference between the parties should be institutionalized.

There are some fantastic congressmen who could beat Franken in 2014, such as Rep. John Kline. But liberals are counting on tea party activists to insist on running someone who can’t win.

Let me introduce you to Marianne Stebbins. This Ron Paul fan helped lose the 2012 Senate election in Minnesota with a libertarian candidate, who lost to the Democrat 31 percent to 65 percent. She thinks the fight within the Republican Party is “frankly … probably a more important debate than the one going on between the Republicans and the Democrats.”

When your new health insurance premiums arrive in the mail, and you can’t find a doctor in your plan who speaks English, tell me the fight between Republicans and Democrats is not that important.

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER

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