Democrats running from their president

Most of my favorite college football teams are off to a good start and they are confident they can win a conference championship and possibly end up in a Bowl Championship Series game.

As the Nov. 2 congressional elections loom, however, the Democrats don't look like a confident team going into the fourth quarter. They are openly saying, "We don't like the game plan." Consider these developments:

■ Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roy Barnes made it a point to say he was busy when President Barack Obama dropped into Atlanta for a recent event. Later Barnes attacked the president's health care law, saying it could be "financially devastating" unless Democratic leaders "in Washington" figure out a way to help states cope with a staggering jump in Medicaid costs. And, for good measure, the Democrat nominee added that ObamaCare "is the greatest failure, modern failure, of political leadership in my lifetime."

■ Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a Sept. 7 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, took a not-so-subtle jab at the president by remarking that the rising debt that is being piled up is a threat to national security.

■ U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., surprisingly broke with one of the major underpinnings of the ObamaCare law he faithfully supported last spring. The one-time Obama cheerleader wrote a letter to his state's health authority director encouraging him to seek a waiver from certain ObamaCare rules so it can "come up with innovative solutions that the federal government has never had the flexibility or will to implement."

■ Most of the 54 "Blue Dog" House Democrats in heated congressional races are distancing themselves from the president's healthcare and spending/debt record as vigorously as Republicans. They recognize that the $1.3 trillion deficit will double the national debt in 2 years and will triple it in 10 years.

■ President Obama's former budget director Peter Orszag actually wrote a newspaper column saying the Bush tax cuts should be extended for two years, and at least four key Democrat senators have already publicly broken with their president over his opposition to extending those cuts.

Whether to allow the tax cuts to expire or to extend them has also ignited a debate over whether the president and most Democrats are hostile to small business. People (including all too many in Congress) who have never run a small business don't realize that many are structured in a way that taxes on their profits are not paid by their companies, but by the companies' owners through their personal income taxes. Republicans maintain that more than half of small-business income would be affected by allowing the so-called "upper income" tax cuts to expire. The expiration would create a significant halt on new hiring or investment.

By the way, if the Democratic majority in Congress continues to fiddle and doesn't address the tax cut soon, the issue could likely slip into a lame duck session of Congress that will probably convene after Nov. 2. Lawmakers (many of them Democrats who will have been defeated) will then be under extreme pressure to extend the cuts to help the economy.

Finally, let's further reflect on that letter by Sen. Wyden -- who is touted in the mainstream media as one of the Democrats' leading healthcare "experts." His letter is described editorially by The Wall Street Journal as an important "political signal." The paper rightly notes, "On ObamaCare, Democrats are having their first political second thoughts, at least in this election season. Mr. Wyden is essentially saying that what his party passed is not acceptable, and if such thinking builds, opponents may have a real chance to replace ObamaCare with something better."

As a growing number of likely voters -- especially the important independents -- tell pollsters they are turning on the Democrat Party, more Democratic candidates are running away from President Obama and his ruinous policies. It is akin to more and more members of a football team starting to ignore their head coach's play calling!

J.C. Watts (JCWatts01@jcwatts.com) is chairman of J.C. Watts Companies, a business consulting group. He is former chairman of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House, where he served as an Oklahoma representative from 1995 to 2002.