EDITORIAL: Delusional Democrats

If Democratic Party leaders are serious about learning why they were annihilated in last year’s election, they’ll have to be brutally honest with themselves.

Judging from the preliminary Democratic Victory Task Force report released last weekend, Democrats remain in a hopeless state of denial — about their record and about their very nature. The report, ostensibly a post-mortem of the November wipeout that gave Republicans control of Congress and swept them into power across the country, ignores the issue most responsible for Democratic losses: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Indeed, the report does not scrutinize a single Democratic domestic or economic policy failure, declaring that all of the party’s ideas are wildly popular solutions while lamenting the economic stagnation of the middle class.

In case Democrats have forgotten, they’ve controlled the White House for six years, and for two of those years, Democrats had full control of Congress as well. The crowning achievement of those two years: Obamacare, a law that was deliberately structured to take full effect between the 2012 and 2014 elections.

In case Democrats have forgotten, Obamacare hasn’t delivered what they promised. It slowed the economic recovery while making health insurance more expensive. It wiped out millions of policies that Americans liked. And, most importantly for Democrats, Obamacare railroaded the unions that got Barack Obama and huge Democratic congressional majorities elected in 2008.

Unions openly warned Democrats they wouldn’t turn out in 2014 if they weren’t granted Obamacare exemptions. Among those unions: the Culinary, which has huge Latino membership and helps drive Latino turnout across Southern Nevada and elsewhere. Latinos also withheld their support because, when Democrats had the votes to pass comprehensive immigration reform and promised to do so, the president and Congress put all their energy into Obamacare instead.

And Democrats are deeply confused why Latinos stayed home?

“We believe that both prosperity and political power thrive best when they grow organically from below,” the report says, “instead of being imposed from above. … It is clear that Americans overwhelmingly support the people and issues that the Democratic Party fights for every day.”

What delusion. Democrats are all about the heavy hand of government, from Obamacare to their Draconian, anti-jobs environmentalist agenda. But these positions have nothing to do with devastating Democratic losses, according to the report. The blame lies with voter photo ID laws and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling.

If Democrats can’t see the problem, they can’t fix it — no matter how many reports they write.