(Bloomberg) — For the third election cycle, Democrats are still debating their options for handling the political fall-out from passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA): fight, flight or finesse.
Former President Bill Clinton advised fellow Democrats to embrace the law on the campaign trail. Democratic polling expert Celinda Lake, who released a new survey last week, told candidates to avoid it.
"The reality is it's a negative. The reality is you can't walk away from it. The reality is you've got to fight it," said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist at the consulting firm Purple Strategies.
In key races, as the now-delayed March 31 deadline for new enrollment on the health insurance exchanges arrives today, Democrats face this reality: The law's a political loser, and there's no easy fix.
Handling the issue deftly is key to Democrats who are at risk of losing control of the U.S. Senate in the November election. Republicans need a net gain of six seats to take over.
It's the third election in a row that PPACA has played a role. In 2010, the year Obama signed it into law, Democrats lost their House majority. In 2012, Obama won re- election when up against Republican Mitt Romney, whose Massachusetts law was a model for PPACA.
Bungled website
The bungled start to the law's insurance exchanges has put Democrats on the defensive again.
Ronald Reagan favored the political maxim "if you're explaining, you're losing."
That hasn't stopped Clinton and others from advocating that the party's House and Senate candidates answer Republican fire with a nuanced message.
When Obama asked him to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., in 2012, Clinton responded that "I could only do it and be effective if he let me explain and defend the health care deal," the former president told nationalmemo.com's Joe Conason in an interview published March 29.
His experience, Clinton said, taught him that it was a "terrible mistake" for Democrats to talk only about their popular positions. Instead, candidates should "turn in toward all controversies and embrace them –- even if you said you were wrong or a mistake was made," he said.
While not every Democrat has Clinton's gift for turning complex policy into simple talking points, Democratic strategist Anna Greenberg said candidates are too easily spooked by Republican attacks on the law.
'Nervousness' unwarranted
"There is a nervousness that is not warranted. I do believe we could go on offense on this and make some pretty strong arguments about what they're for and what we're for," Greenberg said. "It's basically a wash. What I see in my surveys is that it doesn't do much either way."
Republicans say they have the edge and are backing that up with early advertising for the midterm elections.
Since the beginning of last year, 41,439 ads opposing Obama's health insurance law have been run on local broadcast television, according to New York-based Kantar Media's CMAG advertising data reports. By comparison, proponents of PPACA have aired 3,748 spots, or a little more than 8 percent of the total.
Republican strategist Carl Forti, founder of the Alexandria, Va.-based communications firm Black Rock Group, said Democrats can expect more of the same.
"Obamacare isn't just a motivator for Republicans, it's hurting Democrats with independents and soft Democrats," Forti said.
