Baker’s Iraq War analogy

By Norman Leahy | Friday, November 4th, 2011 | Northern Virginia, Politics, Virginia

What passes for the left in Virginia is going bonkers over a comment from Senate candidate Miller Baker that Obamacare is the domestic equivalent of the Iraq War. Naturally, the Washington Post jumped on the story:

“It was the domestic equivalent of the Iraq war,” he says at a recent candidates forum. Video of the comment was posted on Blue Virginia.

The audience can be heard groaning and hissing its disapproval, but Baker presses on.

“It was very much overreach,” he says. “Obamacare was a terrible mistake.”

As the video in question appears on Blue Virginia honcho Lowell Feld’s page, we might be able to assume the groans come from the Democratic faithful. Once upon a forgotten time, they believed the Iraq conflict was a senseless, bloody waste. Including Lowell. Opposition to the conflict was the animating force behind Jim Webb’s 2006 U.S. Senate campaign. But that was then.

Baker, according to the Post, “stood by his analogy,” and continues to believe the massive federal health insurance bill is over reach.

Baker is on solid ground when he calls out Obamacare, particularly with the Republican base. It is a huge, costly and unwieldy hodgepodge of taxes, mandates, penalties and regulation and the subject of litigation that will reach the U.S. Supreme Court. It is one of the prime reasons why the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in 2010, helped energize a Republican sweep in Virginia the year before that and remains an albatross around the national party’s neck heading into 2012.

Conversely, it is an article of faith on the left that it is none of these things and, if fully implemented, will be a boon to our nation’s physical and fiscal health. One lucky customer will also get a pony.

But how will Baker’s Iraq war analogy go over with that same GOP faithful? At one time, criticism of the war was akin to apostasy. Baker’s analogy is a criticism — indirect, to be sure, But it’s still there. So how will the Republicans respond?

I suspect this kerfuffle an instance of the left being upset that one of its golden political oldies is being thrown back at one of the policy areas where they are weakest.

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