I’d love to believe this, but after six years of runaway decline on virtually every measurable front I remain torn about whether this president will ever be held to account for the damage he’s done to the country.

But William L. Gensert says the time is now…

With ObamaCare’s ascendancy and impending crash, America will be on the cusp of transformational action.  The misery the ACA will bring to almost every American cannot be overestimated in its ability to incite anger — and, anger has consequences and repercussions.  The failure of the ACA has the potential to make 2014 a wave election for Republicans.  In 2016, we may see a true conservative as president.

America put men on the moon.  Now, with 3 ½ years and a half a billion dollars, we can’t even build a website.  This is how much Barry and his ilk have degraded the brand.  We used to be the shining light on the hill.  Now, we are darkness at the end of the tunnel.  Barack Obama has been the worst thing that has ever happened to the Oval Office, and in the end, ObamaCare will seal his fate as a failed president.

…

The path forward, almost always begins by going in the wrong direction.  There would have been no Ronald Reagan without Jimmy Carter.  The Republicans need to find a new Reagan.  Like the “Gipper,” he will have to be a fighter and the gloves will have to come off, because ObamaCare has given Republicans the best opportunity to halt the progressive onslaught in a generation.

America, at last, will be listening.

Certainly, conservatives must be open to that possibility, and in fact prepare for it.

And Gensert is absolutely correct that the GOP’s comeback will not come at the hands of someone who presents the electorate with squishy centrism. In the aftermath of this presidency, the party had better present its candidate as a paragon of principle and rectitude, and combine the passion of the Tea Party with a temperament which indicates to people not of Tea Party ideology that he or she will at least offer honest, competent and most of all unintrusive government – meaning that while people in the center and on the left may not agree with his or her policies he/she won’t be doing anything that outright threatens anyone.

In 2014, however, we can definitely see a Republican wave election – regardless of the post-shutdown polling which says otherwise. The reason? While Congress’ approval ratings might be in the toilet and the Republcian party fares especially poorly, the overwhelming theme is the public’s loss of faith in the federal government and politicians as a class. That’s a very Republican-friendly environment; it’s hard for Democrats to push new federal programs to an electorate which is disgusted by Washington. And the damaged GOP brand can be exorcised in large measure by a number of primary opponents to Republican candidates in conservative districts. Which is going to happen.

Moreover, those polls were just a snapshot of 16 days when the shutdown was the big media story. It’s no longer the big media story; what voters will remember about it is the Republicans “went crazy’ over Obamacare and probably not much else.

And they’ll remember that when the public is “going crazy” over Obamacare.

And why would they do that? Because on top of the 10 million or so people (or maybe more) who will be losing insurance policies they bought on the individual market, there will be as many as 93 million people losing their policies through their employers – by the administration’s own calculations…

Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.

Bear in mind that Obama delayed the employer mandate to next year. It will take effect on Jan. 1, 2015. The cancellation letters will begin going out three months or so in advance of that, which means that the furor over the individual market which seems to be fueling the comeback of Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia and driving Obama’s approval ratings to all-time lows will be revisited 10-fold when employer-sponsored insurance begins collapsing on a far larger scale.

And that means Obama and the Democrats will be doing everything they can to delay the employer mandate so those letters don’t go out. If they don’t, you’ll have every business owner in the country screaming about how they can’t afford the Obamacare-compliant policies that would replace what they currently offer their employees – and they’ll do that screaming as they lay off thousands of workers just in time for the election.

It’s a potential catastrophe for the Democrat Party, and it could very well wipe them out in the Senate elections.

If the GOP is smart, they’ll refuse any adjustment to Obamacare other than its repeal from now on. Let it burn until after the 2014 elections. Gensert could well be correct at that point.