RICHMOND, November 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Obamacare has been referred to as President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment, but while campaigning in Virginia this weekend for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, both he and McAuliffe preferred to act as if the health care law never happened.
Ever since McAuliffe’s opponent, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, started painting today’s election as a referendum on Obamacare, he has enjoyed surging poll numbers, moving from a double-digit deficit to within just a few points of a win in a matter of days. The strategy coincided with the disastrous rollout of Obamacare’s health care exchanges, a launch marked by the failure of the sign-up website, drastically lower-than-expected enrollment numbers, and higher-than-expected prices.
As Obama, McAuliffe and Vice President Joe Biden toured the state this weekend, they eschewed any discussion of Obamacare in favor of trying to paint Cuccinelli as an “extremist,” both for his strongly pro-life views and for making a campaign appearance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a member of the “Tea Party” wing of the GOP.
Obama blamed Cruz and the Tea Party for the recent government shutdown, calling them “an extreme faction … willing to hijack the entire party and the country and the economy and grind progress to an absolute halt if they don’t get 100 percent of what they want.” Said Obama, “you cannot afford to have a governor who is thinking the same way.” Governors, the president added, “can’t afford to be ideologues.”
But as the country’s top Democrats maintain their awkward silence regarding Obamacare, Cuccinelli has stepped up his criticism and reminded voters that McAuliffe’s only objection to the controversial law was that he didn’t think it went far enough toward replacing the current American health care system with a single-payer socialist system.
“Tomorrow has turned very much in to a referendum on Obamacare,” Cuccinelli told Fox News on Monday, “as people get cancellation notices, tens of thousands of them in Virginia already, and now we know from the administration we can expect about two million Virginians over the course of the next year to get notices of cancellation of their health insurance. This is being delivered to us courtesy of Obamacare.”
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Said Cuccinelli, “I’m scared of what Obamacare's doing to Virginians. And Terry McAuliffe is scared of what Obamacare is doing to Terry McAuliffe.”
Cuccinelli also reminded voters that he was the first state attorney general to sue to block the controversial law. “I was the first to fight it,” he told Fox News, adding that “we’re hoping people will come to the polls tomorrow to send Washington a message about what a failure Obamacare is.”
Indeed, sending Washington a message seems to have become an obsession on both sides of the race for Virginia governor. The state, which neighbors Washington, D.C. and has a large population of federal and government contract workers, is a “purple” or swing state that closely mirrors the national split over hot-button issues like abortion, gun control and the environment. For that reason, outside groups have dumped millions of dollars into the campaign – most notably, national abortion giant Planned Parenthood, which spent well in excess of a million dollars opposing Cuccinelli, whose defeat the group has called their “top priority.”
Cuccinelli says that while he believes the race is a referendum on Obamacare, when people evaluate Tuesday’s results, regardless of the outcome, they should remember that he came from behind while being massively outspent.
“We're going to have to see how it plays out,” Cuccinelli told Fox News. “Certainly, we have come from behind and closed this to anybody's ball game, in part based upon Obamacare, while being badly outspent.”
Added Cuccinelli, “What people in other states don't see is that we’re being outspent by tremendous ratios on television, coming from out-of-state money, whether it`s Michael Bloomberg or unions or Planned Parenthood, or whomever it is. They're putting tons of money into my opponent and we don't have the equivalent necessarily coming in on our side.”
Even President Obama seems desperate for a McAuliffe win. He openly resorted to scare tactics to motivate supporters at a weekend rally, telling them, “I want to put the fear of God in all of you!” and “we cannot have people stay at home when so much is at stake.”
The race may have more than just symbolic national implications. Given McAuliffe’s close connection to former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (he is a former fundraiser and close friend), the race may serve as a template for Hillary’s predicted 2016 presidential run. If McAuliffe wins Tuesday, his campaign manager, Robby Mook, will be a top contender to manage Hillary’s campaign going forward.
“He’s always been considered one of the best we have,” Democratic strategist Joe Trippi told The Hill. “A big win on Tuesday puts an exclamation mark on that.”
Virginia’s polls close at 7:00 PM EST.
Find your polling station here.