The Lie Of The Year being, namely, “If like your health care plan you can keep it.” PolitiFact ascribed that statement to Barack Obama, but Mary Landrieu echoed it often – and therefore, since she’s up for re-election and vulnerable, she gets to wear the dunce cap along with the president.

President Obama and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) this week won PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” award for falsely promising Louisianians “if you like your health care, you can keep it” under ObamaCare.

Every year PolitiFact lionizes the most ridiculous claim made that year. The clear winner for 2013 is President Obama and Mary Landrieu’s lie. Congratulations or something.

This dubious honor comes on the heels of Landrieu’s desperate and panicked effort to stop her polls from plummeting and distract from her broken promises to Louisianians, launching an ad that would make Pinocchio blush.

The truth is that ObamaCare was designed to force many younger or healthy people who liked their current plans into exchanges (where those plans may no longer exist). That isn’t a glitch or an unintended consequence of the law, that is how ObamaCare is SUPPOSED to work (which is one of many reasons why there was so much objection to it).

In fact, Mary Landrieu supported the very ObamaCare rule that’s responsible for the health insurance cancellations that have caused so much consternation over the last few months. Nearly 93,000 Louisianians’ health insurance policies are in jeopardy and Mary Landrieu is directly to blame for that reality.

“Mary Landrieu is finally getting the recognition and notoriety she deserves for her years of repeatedly deceiving Louisiana voters about ObamaCare,” said NRSC Press Secretary Brook Hougesen. “After all the deceptions, lies and broken promises about ObamaCare, Louisianians are wondering whether they can trust anything that Mary Landrieu says.”

And the Louisiana GOP…

“Mary Landrieu’s credibility crisis is getting worse and worse,” LAGOP spokesperson Ryan Cross said. “She can’t hide from her liberal voting record, she can’t masquerade as a moderate and she can’t escape the lies she told the American people. Mary Landrieu gave us Obamacare and then staked her career on its success. Louisiana voters are getting ready to call her bluff and she’s running scared.”

Lost in all the political-speak, or perhaps not lost in it, is something pretty significant in Landrieu’s re-election race – namely, that getting caught in what a left-leaning organization like PolitiFact called the Lie of the Year means Mary’s credibility is now open for examination.

Particularly in light of the brazen, shameless and almost admirable-in-its-dishonesty ad she’s now running about how she “fixed” Obamacare.

It should be a big point of emphasis to paint her as mendacious, and that’s what they’re doing. The fact is, success in doing that could be the whole race in a nutshell; Landrieu flat-out lied about Obamacare, and it matters to the tens of thousands of her constituents who got put out of their health insurance as a result. And because her lies were consequential to lots of people where Obamacare is concerned, what else has she lied about?

A politician without credibility, who has proven she can’t be trusted, isn’t good for much of anything. That’s a politician on her way out of office.

The National Journal has noticed. Here’s what’s in their daily e-mail blast, Hotline’s Latest Edition, today…

Sen. Mary Landrieu‘s (D-LA) reelection campaign looks a lot different than it did six months ago. Then, Republicans privately conceded the three-term senator was a tough out even in a midterm election. Landrieu was considered the best politician on the board in 2014, an old-school Southern populist whose deep connection with her home state would once again pull her through to victory. Not anymore. Perhaps more than any other senator facing voters next year, Landrieu’s fortunes have been changed by the disastrous implementation of Obamacare. And now she and her allies are scrambling to help put the pieces back together before it’s too late.

— Both her campaign and the Democratic super Pac, Senate Majority PAC, went on air this week. Not surprisingly, Landrieu’s campaign stuck to a positive spot focused on her efforts to fix Medicare, while the outside group took dead aim at her chief opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R). Yes, Americans For Prosperity has spent about $1.6 million on air already in Louisiana, but the Democrats’ two-pronged response isn’t a tit-for-tat game over the airwaves. It’s about repairing the damage done during the last two months as fast as they can.

— Landrieu’s squeezed by the dual mandates of her campaign: driving up black turnout while retaining a share of the white vote. She has to do both to win reelection, and Obamacare’s troubles make balancing those competing demands especially hard. It’s no coincidence that when Landrieu’s campaign went on air with a spot about Obamacare, it showed everywhere except the heavily-black New Orleans TV market.

— One thing the senator is counting on: Her campaign infrastructure. No one doubts Landrieu can put together an impressive ground game, and because Cassidy has yet to emerge as undisputed Republican standard-bearer (GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal has yet to endorse him in the all-party general election), Republican efforts to organize in Louisiana will lag. If the race becomes a close battle fought over every pocket of voters, expect the incumbent to have the edge.

Landrieu shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, yet. But her path to reelection looks a lot rockier than it did in June.