So . . . in 2014, just as premiums begin to reflect the changes of Obamacare, and in the year where the uninsured must start paying the government $95 or 1 percent of their income (whichever is higher) . . . Democrats have decided they’ll embrace Obamacare and make it a centerpiece of their reelection message.

It will not surprise you that many of the currently uninsured are quite confused about what Obamacare means to them, and that some are saying they’ll just pay the fine because it’s simpler.

The Congressional Budget Office calculated that in 2014, 44 million Americans will lack insurance. But not all of those people will be paying a fine; some will be

exempted from the penalty tax — for example, because they will have income low enough that they are not required to file an income tax return, because they are members of Indian tribes, or because the premium they would have to pay would exceed a specified share of their income (initially 8 percent in 2014 and indexed over time). CBO and JCT estimate that between 18 million and 19 million uninsured people in 2016 will qualify for one or more of those exemptions.

By 2016, that number of uninsured drops to 31 million . . . when the fees are $695 or 2.5 percent of a person’s income.

The point is, starting in 2014, a lot of people who don’t have insurance and find the process of getting insurance immensely confusing and frustrating will suddenly be told they must pay the government for their failure to get insurance. And at that precise moment, Democrats will ask for their vote as an expression of gratitude.

On MSNBC this morning, Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough dance around the obvious conclusion:

TODD: Why aren’t there more Democrats jumping on this? This is outrageous no matter what political party you are, that an arm of the government, maybe it’s a set of people just in one office but, mind you, that one office was put in charge of dealing with these 501c4s and things like that.

SCARBOROUGH: Why didn’t the president say something on Friday afternoon?

TODD: I don’t know. Maybe they were distracted by Benghazi. Maybe they made the decision they didn’t want it to be about healthcare. I raised this question — where is the sense of outrage? And the only pushback was, Jay Carney spoke about this at the press briefing and he was pretty strong. I have to say it didn’t sound very strong to me. I don’t know if the White House realizes. I think this story has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi.

The obvious conclusion: President Obama, the past and current secretaries of the Treasury, and Democrats on Capitol Hill don’t really care! To them, the use of government resources to harass and impede their political opponents is just how the game is played.

When Obama came to Washington, he brought the Chicago rules with him.

At the conference I’m going to today, one of the topics of discussion will be whether Obamacare will be altered in the coming Congress.

My first instinct is that any reform of Obamacare is unlikely to pass, because the major factions in Washington have completely different priorities. Most Republicans would like to stop it in its tracks, repeal it entirely or almost entirely, and replace it with free-market-oriented reforms and tort reform and so on. As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said yesterday:

I am proud that Senate Republicans stood united today and voted unanimously to defund Obamacare. While I’m disappointed that the amendment did not pass, we will not give up. And today’s vote demonstrates that the fight to repeal Obamacare is far from over.

There are some Democrats who want to delay or repeal parts of Obamacare, such as the new tax on medical devices. Senator Al Franken (D., Minn.) calls it a “job-killing tax.” But there are probably very few Republicans who are eager to save congressional Democrats from the consequences of their actions. You passed it, guys, now you explain the consequences to your displeased constituents.

Of course, unifying Democrats behind a series of reforms to Obamacare will present its own challenges. There are quite a few who would prefer that any changes to Obamacare bring it closer to single-payer. Last year, all 75 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said they would push for a single-payer system if the Supreme Court struck down Obamacare.

And of course, President Obama would want changes to the bill to be minimal or little-noticed, as each change represents a concession that he and his allies didn’t get it right the first time.

(“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”)

So my conclusion is that it would take some sort of really catastrophic consequence to get all the factions in Washington united on changing Obamacare as is.

Enter a really catastrophic consequence, stage left:

Some Americans could see their insurance bills double next year as the health care overhaul law expands coverage to millions of people. The nation’s big health insurers say they expect premiums — or the cost for insurance coverage — to rise between 20 and 100 percent for millions of people due to changes that will occur when key provisions of the Affordable Care Act roll out in January.

A giant increase in the cost of health insurance, driven by the “Affordable Care Act,” might drive a national fury that will make the 2009 and 2010 Tea Party rallies look like . . . well, actual tea parties with little finger sandwiches and cloth napkins.

At the official taxpayer-funded White House Twitter account, Jesse Lee shares the White House’s “To Do” list for Congress: “Reward American jobs, not outsourcing; refinancing for responsible homeowners; tax credits for small business jobs; clean energy manufacturing; veterans jobs corps.”

It’s good to see the president finally sharing House Republicans’ frustration with the obstructionist mentality of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Perhaps Obama could call up his friend Harry and get him to bring to the floor House-passed bills like the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, the Hydropower Development and Rural Jobs Act, the North American-Made Energy Security Act, the Jobes and Energy Permitting Act of 2011, the Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act, the Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act, the Small Business Tax Cut Act, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act, the Consumer Financial Protection & Soundness Act, the Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act, the EPA Regulatory Relief Act, the Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act, the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, the Regulatory Accountability Act, the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act.

Again, regardless of whether one likes those bills or not, one would think that they deserve at least an up-or-down vote, if not passage.

But the president has some things left on his to-do list, as well. Among them:

• Come up with a serious plan to reduce the deficit. Maybe he could talk to Alan Simpson or Erskine Bowles more frequently than he talks to, say, his caddie or Jimmy Fallon.
• Come up with a serious plan to reform entitlements and ensure the long-term stability of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, instead of scaring seniors and demonizing those who come up with reform plans.
• Nudge the Senate Democrats to come up with a budget.
• Build the other half of the Keystone Pipeline, the half that actually requires presidential approval.
• Get his “all of the above” energy policy to stop eliminating options like ANWR, continental shelf drilling, ensure that the EPA will continue to approve fracking, etc. so that it actually meets the “all of the above” standard.
• Interview new solicitor general candidates.
• Cut back on the campaign fund-raisers, because as a famous man once said, “I do think that at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”

Let’s get cracking!

Politico:

At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the ramifications for those miscalculations have been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.

If professional politicians completely misjudged the politics of the legislation they were passing, think about how well they assessed the policy implications of what they passed!

Of course, some of us are not quite so surprised.

UPDATE: A previous version of this post listed a group of Democrats who were called Pelosi’s “Suicide Squad” before the Obamacare vote. Most of those lawmakers, including Walt Minnick, voted against passage of Obamacare. I regret the error.

Of course, once it passed, none of the lawmakers were willing to sign a discharge petition for either of two bills that would have repealed Obamacare . . . raising the question of whether these lawmakers seriously opposed the legislation, or merely wanted political cover.

In Mike Allen’s morning newsletter, we read:

Huge three days ahead, with the sharpest intersection of high-stakes politics and government since the midterms: President Obama’s 1:35 p.m. address on his long-term plan for deficits will be covered as the first speech of the 2012 campaign. Team Obama wants the American public to see the president as “the adult in the room,” and views this is a chance for POTUS to steal beyond-the-Beltway momentum from House Republicans.

1. I’m pleased to hear it, but do you remember reading anything recently in the mainstream media about House Republicans having “beyond-the-Beltway momentum”? We heard a great deal of credit to Paul Ryan for having a serious and detailed plan. But somehow, we never hear much about Republican advantages or momentum until the narrative is that Democrats are “making their comeback.”

2. If your staff has to leak that you’re the “adult in the room,” you’re not actually the adult in the room.

3. How revealing is that metaphor? The deficit and debt are huge. Despite the allegedly improving economy, this year’s “deficit is on track to set a new record, with economists at the Congressional Budget Office forecasting an imbalance of $1.5 trillion this year, exceeding the old record of $1.41 trillion in 2009.”

Congressional Democrats insist the problem can be dealt with by raising the top tax rate to 47 percent and ending all U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2012, cutting defense by $674 billion over four years. Congressional Republicans are by and large backing the Ryan plan: entitlement reform, repealing Obamacare, simplifying the tax code, replacing the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax, and a binding cap on total federal spending in proportion to GDP. Choices ranging from the politically difficult to the politically impossible. Ideas ranging from the insane to the innovative.

The Obama response? “Oh, you crazy kids. What a mess you’ve made. Don’t worry, Daddy’s here to straighten this all out.”

Over in the last Jolt of the week, a discussion of the House Democrats’ rebellion against Obama’s tax deal:

Earlier in the day at Red State, Dan McLaughlin wondered if Obama was on the verge of becoming “the Lamest Duck“: “The obvious lesson, if the deal collapses, will be that Obama can’t deliver anything — he can be pushed into compromise with GOP priorities, as he wouldn’t before the election, but he can’t bring along his own caucus, which has suffered so many losses for following his lead. Liberals will learn that they are better off striking their own distance from an unpopular and increasingly impotent leader. And heavy liberal opposition to the deal will make it impossible to blame DeMint or Republicans for the collapse, and will encourage conservatives to push for even fewer compromises with Obama in 2011. That calculus of legislative forces will make it hard for Obama to plan for the other leg of the Clinton strategy, a budget battle in which the GOP blinks. Obama can try to use the whole mess to argue that ‘Washington is broken’ and all that, but it’s a hard argument to make from the Rose Garden.”

Dennis the Peasant is left calling the president a genius, sort of: “We await Steve Benen’s (as well as Andrew Sullivan’s) hysterical denunciation of said nihilistic obstructionists in 3, 2, 1 . . . Note: It takes a special sort of political genius to strike the kind of deal that sets in motion the forces that will simultaneously (a) alienate your political base, and (b) tear your political party to pieces.”

Robert Stacy McCain looks over the Democrats fighting the tax cut deal the hardest and finds, “Looking at the list of more than 50 House Democrats who signed the Welch letter, I see several names — including Paul Kanjorski, Jim Oberstar and Alan Grayson — of Democrats who got beat in the mid-term election. Their careers are over and so they’ve got a political free-pass for these lame ducks to take a stand on ‘principle,’ possibly resulting in a no-deal meltdown that results in Americans paying higher taxes next year. And maybe, as Larry Summer warns, pushing the economy into a double-dip recession. Because of hate. Liberals hate rich people, and they don’t care if the rest of us suffer, just so they get to inflict some pain on the rich.”

One of Mickey Kaus’ recurring points is that for a guy who appeared on the national scene and did a Svengali-like job persuading Americans to elect him to the most powerful office in the land, since Obama became president, he’s suddenly turned into the guy who couldn’t persuade Snooki to get into a tanning bed. He gave about a million speeches on health care, and Americans tuned him out after the first thousand. Americans rejected sales pitches for Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, Martha Coakley, or a slew of congressional Democrats this year. And now he can’t even persuade Democrats to accept a tax cut for high earners for a few years to avoid a double-dip recession. Then again, this may say more about Congressional Democrats than the guy trying to twist their arms.

The House Democrats reject the tax deal in a non-binding caucus vote.

This is another sign of Obama’s diminished influence, leverage, and power after the midterms. Several dozen of these House Democrats are out of work in January (and presumably have no interest in being Obama appointees or ambassadors). The White House could threaten that the president won’t campaign for them come 2012, but let’s face it, that didn’t turn out to be so helpful for Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, Martha Coakley, or a slew of congressional Democrats this year. And many members of the Democratic caucus are in such safe seats, they’ll never need Obama to come campaign for them. They probably figure he’ll need their help by 2012.

I understand the White House line is that today’s rejection is part of the “normal process.” Really? Is it normal for a majority of the president’s own party to vote against deals he makes?

UPDATE: In light of this . . .

President Obama warned his fellow Democrats on Wednesday that they risk plunging the country into a double-dip recession if they reject his tax-cut deal with Republicans.

. . . we can only conclude one of two things:

A) A majority of congressional Democrats don’t believe the president when he says a particular act is necessary to prevent a double-dip recession. In short, most members of Obama’s own party no longer trust his judgment on economic issues.

B) A majority of congressional Democrats agree, but don’t care, because they’re willing to endure a double-dip recession if that’s what it takes to ensure the rich pay higher taxes.