Quote of the Day:

President Obama has always wanted to be a historic president.  In an election that was driven by Obamacare, he took another big step toward that end on Tuesday — just not in the way he intended.

–Jeffrey Anderson on the ObamaCare Democrats

Writing over at the Weekly Standard, Anderson observes that the last president who lost the House in one midterm election and then lost the Senate in the next midterm was Woodrow Wilson, nearly a century ago.

The Democrats must have thought they were invulnerable five years ago when they held a 20-seat majority in the Senate and 79-seat majority in the House.  

But then they passed ObamaCare, over the objections from the public and without a single Republican vote. Even by Capitol Hill standards, this is hubris. As of now, the GOP has a Senate majority of eight and a House majority of 51.

In today’s must-read, Anderson concludes that the lesson from Tuesday is that ObamaCare (like the erstwhile Democratic majority that birthed it) not invulnerable:

The election was bad news for Obamacare not only because that legislation took another public shellacking, and because the number of legislators willing to defend it is dwindling.  It was also bad news for Obamacare because of what happened in Virginia.  For on a night of great Republican victories, the GOP’s standout performance may well have been in defeat. 

Virginia senatorial candidate Ed Gillespie appears to have fallen just short in his effort to topple heavily favored incumbent Mark Warner.  (The challenger trails by less than 1 point in a race that has yet to be finalized and could be headed for a recount.)  But alone among Republican senatorial candidates, Gillespie ran on a detailed conservative alternative to Obamacare.  In advancing such an alternative, and in almost pulling off a monumental upset while doing so, he broke new ground and offered his fellow Republicans a useful political and policy blueprint going forward.

With the right conservative alternative in play, Obamacare can be repealed.  That is the main lesson that Republicans should take away from Tuesday night’s triumph.