Fox 13 in Tampa put out this segment on how bad the Affordable Care Act is politically, and how the GOP is killing Democrats with it…

FOX 13 News

The piece makes the case Republicans are winning on Obamacare. And in a general sense, that’s likely true; I just wrote a piece for The American Spectator which is likely to appear at their site Wednesday or Thursday on the Senate race in Arkansas, and the upshot of the piece is that Mark Pryor is crashing and burning in his attempt to hold off a Republican takeover in the person of his challenger Tom Cotton – and the race is all about Obamacare, according to the local people I talked to.

The Arkansas race is hardly alone.

But it’s not so much that Republicans are winning on Obamacare; it’s that the Democrats have lost.

They’ve lost, because as the old adage says: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. We have a corollary: If you can’t explain, you’re screwed.

Screwed is the only way to describe a party which responds to a CBO report claiming that the disincentive to work inherent in Obamacare will downsize the American labor force by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs by saying that’s a good thing. Screwed is when you send Rep. Keith Ellison, one of the least articulate, least intelligent and least sympathetic members you have, out to decry the American work ethic and happily claim Obamacare will make us more like other industrialized countries where the people don’t work as hard and aren’t as productive as our people are.

When you run as the Party Of Unemployment, you’re not going to win. Yes, Democrats have eroded the national culture. That’s unquestionable. But the majority of the country still works, and the majority of the country not working still wants to.

The GOP could do almost anything at this point and Obamacare will kill Democrats in the fall. The Fox 13 piece gives a good hint at that truth.

But it’s very dangerous at this point to give the Republicans the idea that they’re “winning” the messaging war on this or any other topic. The GOP’s game is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to win national elections across the board when something as easy as the abject failure of Obamacare isn’t the defining issue. Yes, Republicans are likely to retake the Senate – but that’s because there are more than enough red-state seats held by Democrats available for the taking to do so without actually moving the political needle.

We need higher standards than that. We’ll take what we can get in the meantime.