Happy New Year, America! Last year at this time, we’d barely finished celebrating the world not ending, despite the Mayan calendar, when we were warned that we were headed over a fiscal cliff. Looking back, those nightmare scenarios seem kind of silly. But there’s something coming in 2014 that I guarantee you will shake our nerves and rattle our brains, to quote Jerry Lee Lewis. And that’s the November elections. This is no ordinary mid-term election. Democrats are desperate to retake the House so they can make a two-year, full-court press to enact Obama’s agenda. Republicans are equally determined to retake the Senate and prevent that. What else can we expect in 2014? Look for more delays in implementing Obamacare. It’s bizarre to recall now that the whole reason we had a government shutdown was because Republicans wanted to delay Obamacare, and the President absolutely refused. That was before we found out the program was built by the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. It was laid on a foundation of bad economics and false assumptions. Delaying parts of it won’t make it work, it will just make it fail slower. But this year, the Democrats’ goal won’t be to insure Obamacare works so much as to try to keep its failures from becoming too obvious until after November. I expect that will be harder than they think. For years, most Americans were too busy trying to pay the mortgage to give it much thought. But now that it’s here, and people are dealing with canceled policies, higher premiums and all the rest, it won’t be easy to lull them back to sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kathleen Sebelius announces a new prescription drug benefit, just to provide disgruntled voters with unlimited sleeping pills. Another thing I can predict with certainty, but no joy, is that political rhetoric will hit new lows of partisan viciousness. The 2014 elections may determine whether Obama becomes the lamest of ducks, or gets two more years of Democratic control to cement his agenda, from immigration reform to packing the courts with liberal judges. The campaigning will be cutthroat, and the bitterness will likely spill over into society at large. My hope is that in 2014, we’ll all be able to stay grounded enough to remember there’s more to life than politics. To come together to help our neighbors, wherever disaster strikes, and to get some things done. And let’s please resist the temptation to “unfriend” people, just because they don’t see eye-to-eye with us on every issue. Once the votes are counted, we’ll all have to go back to living together again. But there is a bright spot: 2015 is NOT an election year. We’ll have all of next year to recuperate from this year. We’re gonna need it.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 20:00:00 +0000
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