If the U.S. Supreme Court throws out his healthcare reform law, President Barack Obama will find himself saddled with comparisons to Jimmy Carter that he won’t be able to overcome, columnist John Fund writes in the
National Review Online.
The nation’s highest court is expected to rule Thursday on Obamacare. It could toss out the whole law or dismiss the individual mandate, which would gut the measure. And that, Fund says, could consign Obama’s presidency to the scrap heap of history.
“If Obamacare is tossed aside in whole or in part by the Supreme Court tomorrow, history will view the bill as one of the most remarkable blunders made by any president — both in terms of policy and politics,” Fund wrote Wednesday.
Any way you look at it, the timing is terrible for Obama.
“It’s never good if a president’s central domestic-policy achievement is trashed months before an election, and in this case it could be politically fatal,” Fund said.
“But if Obamacare vanishes or the individual mandate is eliminated, look for Democrats to panic. There will also be comparisons to Jimmy Carter — the last Democratic president to lose re-election — and his ‘malaise’ period,” he said.
He said several columnists and commentators are “openly saying that today’s political environment reminds them of the summer of 1980, when the wheels came off Jimmy Carter’s presidency.”
Even if the court leaves Obamacare largely intact, the unpopular law will remain a big obstacle for the president’s re-election hopes, Fund said.
“Obama will have to carry it as an albatross into the fall campaign knowing that the majority of likely voters want it repealed, and they can accomplish that goal in only one way: removing him from office,” he wrote.
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