The Dish

Republican candidate David Jolly won yesterday’s special election in Florida’s 13th Congressional district, defeating Democrat Alex Sink in a cash-flush race that had been characterized as a referendum on Obamacare and a bellwether for November:

Sink was a test case for the Democrats’ 2014 women’s economic platform as the party seeks to turn out more women voters who trend Democratic. She also road tested their Obamacare messaging—Sink’s line at its core was “I support the Affordable Care Act but I also support major fixes.” …

After Jolly’s victory, Democrats need to win 17 seats in November to take back the House. Jolly will have to run again this fall to win a full term. No word yet on if Sink will seek a rematch.

Weigel advises against extracting any overarching narrative:

Honestly, having seen both Sink and Jolly in action, [t]hey were both lousy.

Sink wasn’t from the district, which hurt her on the margins. Jolly was slicker than Sink, but ran a pretty transactional campaign about knowing how to pick up Bill Young’s portfolio and start sprinting. It was reminiscent of the campaign Democrat Mark Critz ran to hold the late Rep. John Murtha’s seat, in 2010 — a staffer promising to keep the wheels turning. Some of the outside ads focused not on Obamacare, but on Sink’s record as CFO. And even the Obamacare-centric ads warned voters that the problem with the law was that it would cut Medicare. Not exactly a “repeal Obamacare” campaign there — the US Chamber’s ads, interestingly, didn’t even suggest that the law needed to be repealed. They referred to the “Obamacare mess.”

Kilgore also yawns:

[S]pecial elections rarely have any clear predictive value. All we really know now is that about 180,000 voters (as compared to 329,000 in the district in 2012, and 266,000 in 2010) in a district with a Cook PVI of R+1 gave a Republican a victory by a margin of 1.9% (about 3500 votes), with a Libertarian winning 4%. If you want to try to claim that represents some sort of history-bending or prophetic result, go right ahead, but it’s a bit absurd.

I’m guessing (and we can only guess) that the electorate that showed up was crazy old and mighty pale, but then again, if old white folks are voting Republican at the same levels as they did in 2010, that’s not a good sign for Democrats. Come to think of it, “Midterms Ahead!” is not a good sign for Democrats. But nothing that happened in Florida last night changed the odds in any significant way.

Cillizza reads the result as mildly bad news for Democrats:

This was a race that most political observers expected Sink to win. Jolly was a lobbyist — not exactly the best profession in this political environment — who was decidedly unproven as a candidate. He had to beat back a sitting state representative in a primary that drained his resources to the point where Sink was able to drastically outspend him. And, he did spend the entirety of the race bashing Obamacare, the issue that Republicans insist will be their silver bullet issue in the fall.

Tomasky wonders if Sink didn’t fight hard enough for Obamacare:

Let’s watch how this result affects the Florida gubernatorial race for starters. Democrat Charlie Crist has been defending Obamacare—in terms of accepting the Medicaid money—far more aggressively than Sink did. Crist leads Republican Rick Scott in recent polls, by about seven points. Watch how hard Scott—who actually supported taking the Obamacare-Medicaid money for a short time—hits Crist on this point, and how Crist responds, and how the polls change, if they do. Rather than just getting the vapors from Sink’s loss, this is what Democrats nationally ought to be watching. If Crist’s lead shrinks, then Democrats really will run for the hills.

To Byron York, Sink’s lackluster defense of the ACA illustrates a bigger challenge for Democrats:

Sink’s campaign showed the difficulties of the Democrats’ defense of Obamacare. They have to say they want to fix the program because almost nobody (a bare eight percent in the latest Kaiser Foundation survey) wants to keep the law as is. But to fix the aspects of Obamacare that are imposing new burdens on millions of Americans — higher premiums, higher deductibles, a hugely unpopular mandate, and narrower choices of doctors, hospitals, and prescription drugs — Democrats would have to advocate fundamental changes in the law that they have so far steadfastly refused to accept. Get rid of the individual mandate? To do so would rip the heart out of Obamacare, tantamount to repealing it altogether. Many Democrats would rather lose than do that.

The latest ACA numbers, in a nutshell:

About 4.2 million people have signed up for health plans on Obamacare exchanges through the end of February, making it unlikely that the Obama administration will hit the estimate of 6 million enrollees by a key deadline at the end of March. Whatever momentum appeared to be building in January dropped off in February, as the number of sign ups fell below the administration’s expectations.

Which is a big reason why Obama took to the ferns. Philip Klein thinks it’s “worrisome for backers of the law is that young people still aren’t signing up in the numbers the administration once deemed necessary for the program’s viability”:

The White House had originally said nearly 40 percent of the 7 million Americans initially projected to enroll would have to be young and healthy to offset the cost of covering older and sicker Americans. When initial signs pointed to low youth enrollment, many supporters of the law argued that younger individuals would enroll later in the process.

But in February, individuals between 18 and 34 years old made up just 27 percent of those signing up — the same as January. Cumulatively, just 25 percent of signups have come from that age demographic.

McArdle is on the same page:

Unless we get a huge rush of young people signing up at the last moment — which is entirely possible — the insurance pool is going to be much older than expected, and that probably means it will be much more expensive than projected. In that event, either the federal government will have to make big payments to insurers through its risk-adjustment programs, or the price of policies will probably rise significantly next year.

More cold water from Suderman:

The administration is still counting sign-ups, not completed enrollments—so the real number of paid enrollments is substantially lower. The monthly “enrollment” reports released by the administration don’t actually count enrollments. Instead, they count people who have “picked a plan” within the exchange system. But multiple reports from insurers suggest that about 20 percent of people who sign up aren’t paying their first month’s premium, and thus aren’t enrolled. Other reports suggest a further attrition through non-payment of around 2 to 5 percent in the second month. What this means is that whatever the final number of sign ups is, the true number of enrollments will be significantly smaller.

Christopher Flavelle argues that the “worst-case scenario for Obamacare enrollment isn’t that premiums go up because the risk pool was worse than expected”:

Rather, it’s that Democrats overestimated the demand among Americans, and particularly young Americans, for insurance coverage that’s both less generous than employer-based plans and more expensive than the plans prohibited by the law.

There’s no reason yet to think that’s happening. It’s possible that the number of young people who’ve signed up for so far — a little over 1 million — will double, or more, by the end of open enrollment. If not, it’s possible the tax penalty will persuade more of them to sign up next year.

But after five months of open enrollment, the level of demand among young Americans to buy subsidized health insurance remains unclear. The answer to that question matters a lot more than what happened last month.

Finally, via Cohn, here’s a reaction from Kaiser VP Larry Levitt:

This enrollment report is somewhat ho hum, which in some sense is good news for those running the program. It means that things are basically on track. Most of the uninsured were never expected to sign up in year one, and because of the early technical problems, actually enrollment will probably fall short of expectations.  At this point, though, the program is pretty much functioning as anticipated.

In terms of what this all means for the number of Americans uninsured or how people feel about the coverage their getting, we’re unfortunately going to have to be patient until reliable numbers are available.

A reader writes:

Oh, give it a rest. This is no constitutional crises here; far from it. The oversight the Congress and Senate are supposed to engage in has long been revealed as toothless, thanks to their own actions post-9/11. Feinstein’s histrionics after this latest incident? You reap what you sow, motherfuckers. There isn’t enough schadenfreude to go around after this incident. And Obama won’t do a thing. Don’t believe me? Watch. Oh he may spin a good yarn, but his lack of actions is the tell.

This response to Feinstein’s stand seems to me to be a telling aspect of the far left. They’re so alienated from our entire polity they cynically see no difference between the CIA and Feinstein, because Feinstein for so long has been such a stalwart defender of the CIA. Which means to say they have given up trying to reform the system and are now interested solely in undermining it by leaks and exposure. I would much prefer the system to be fixed by appropriate constitutional channels, precisely because it will be much more durable if it is. To have Feinstein now in that camp is a huge victory for those seeking accountability from the CIA. But the Snowden-style cynics huff and walk off the battle field.

Another reader:

I think your criticisms of the CIA are sort of toothless because you don’t bring President Obama into it.

We’re seeing bad problems with both NSA and CIA, as well as DoJ policies that attack journalists who report on what’s going on.  So I don’t think it’s fair to say this is a Brennan thing, despite the fact that he’s obviously responsible for his own role and for CIA’s actions.

Every now and then you write a post about how you can’t understand why the president doesn’t do something about these crazy guys who work for him, or why he doesn’t do anything about the torturers, etc.  Those posts are hard to read, because they assume that the president is a right-thinking guy who sees these issues as we do, and who inexplicably refrains from taking appropriate action anyway. I don’t know why you’d believe that the president is on the right side of these issues. I think you’re on the side of the angels, so to speak.  But your analysis is wrong.

I even think President Obama is on the side of the angels.  They’re all trying to protect the country.  But the president’s judgment is way off base on this.

Another speculates:

I have always felt that when Obama became president in 2009, that he was made aware of Bush-era offenses so horrific that revealing them was seen by his people as being more damaging than concealing them would be. Real hardcore torture stuff with a paper trail that wrapped around the whole lot of them of a level that the US would lose ALL world credibility for a generation, even if Obama rounded up people and turned them over to the ICC. Doesn’t make it right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how it played out.

I sure hope that’s not the case. But I have a sinking feeling it is.

After watching DiFi’s speech, the course of action Milibank recommends:

If the White House wishes to repair the damage, it would declassify without further delay the report done by Feinstein’s committee — along with the Panetta Review. If the White House won’t, Feinstein’s panel and others would be justified in holding up CIA funding and nominations and conducting public hearings.

Agreed. But here is Rubio, equating the Senate investigation staffers with CIA lawyers, as if there was some kind of equivalence:

Well, again, because I’m a member of that committee, I’m — others may choose to be more forthcoming about — but I try to protect the nature of the work we do in that committee.  Let me just say that I think that story has two sides; I think it’s a bit more complicated than what’s being put out there by Senator Feinstein or others. I think at the end of the day there should be an impartial investigation as to what happened. And you may end up finding out that both sides are to blame, that both sides committed mistakes … But there should be an impartial investigation of it, and I think until that point people should reserve judgment. But I would just caution that I don’t think anyone has a clean hand and I think it’s important for the full truth to come out. I think people may be surprised to learn that, in this case, there were no good guys and maybe two or three bad ones.

Notice the attempt to claim that “both sides” have “unclean hands” – as if perpetrating torture is somehow equivalent to a vital oversight function of the Congress. Then there’s a veiled threat – gleefully touted by Eli Lake – that the CIA could retaliate against a sitting president by leaking information to try and damage him:

“Any agency can undermine just about anyone,” said Pete Hoekstra, who served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the first two years of Bush’s second term. “We saw that under the Bush administration, there were leaks coming out all over the place. You never knew where they were coming from and some of them were coming from the intelligence community and the objective was to embarrass President Bush.”

If the CIA and the broader intelligence community come to feel the same way about Obama, the White House could find itself as under siege as Bush was in his second term. Then Obama would not only have to face opposition to his foreign policy from Republicans in Congress, but also the bureaucracy of spies that know many of his darkest secrets.

Just take a moment to ponder that empirical prediction. It assumes that the CIA is an entity independent of the president, who is the head of the executive branch. It assumes that the CIA will act against the president if it feels exposed or slighted. Nothing could more baldy illustrate the desperate need to cut this anti-democratic and anti-constitutional power-center down to size. When an agency lies to the White House over torture, when it spies on the Senate investigating its torture program, it has become a rogue threat to our political system. I fear that Obama’s pusillanimity on accountability for war crimes has merely emboldened them to further illegality.

Dickerson weighs in:

We are no longer in a predictable fight between two branches of government anticipated by the framers.

These are public accusations of criminal activity and a cover-up. It’s a class of warfare that people have been craving since Snowden started leaking secrets about the U.S. surveillance state. Whether you think the intelligence agencies have gone too far or not, it’s important to have the people’s representatives battling for their right to do the job the Constitution puts before them. Otherwise the system gets out of whack. That was one of the lessons of Snowden’s revelations and it’s also the point of the story Feinstein took to the Senate floor to tell.

Drum adds:

[I]f there’s one thing an intelligence agency shouldn’t do, it’s get caught monitoring the Senate committee that oversees it. The intelligence community can spy on millions of Americans and Dianne Feinstein yawns. But spy on Dianne Feinstein and you’re in trouble.

And that tells you one more important thing. If the CIA has finally forced one of its most tenacious defenders over the years to the kind of speech she gave yesterday, it is clearly out of bounds and our of control. Only the president can rein it in. The question is: will he? And does the CIA have the potential to humiliate or undermine him if he does?

(Photo of DiFi from yesterday via Getty)