Suppose, for example, that Romney is fated to lose. In that case, it’s always nice for elite Republicans to have laid down a “told you so” marker earlier in the process – not only does it make them look smart, but it also can help control the spin on that loss. That is, a Bill Kristol can already begin to make the case that Romney lost because he didn’t listen to Bill Kristol often enough. Or, less personally, because he didn’t sufficiently embrace the issues and causes that Bill Kristol wants the Republican Party to embrace.

What if Romney wins, though? Won’t the critics look bad and lose clout within the party?

Nope. For one thing, few if any will remember what any of them wrote months before the election (that is, no one will remind anybody; in the Romney loses case, the critics in question can quote themselves all they want). It’s not hard to devise criticism that anticipates what the campaign is apt to do anyway; in that case, the critics can actually take credit for a Romney win, which clearly only came because the campaign adopted their July insights! See, I told you this was win-win.

One might also note that the timing of this set of gripes was almost perfectly designed to make them noticed by political professionals (and political junkies) but almost no actual voters: Not only was it a holiday week when regular people weren’t paying attention to politics, but it was a week ending with a scheduled major news story – the monthly jobs report – guaranteed to change the topic away from any sustained negative attention to the Romney campaign generated by the criticisms.

There’s a bit more to it, however. This set of criticisms is a familiar one from previous campaigns: The candidate and his staff are too isolated and insufficiently experienced in the realities of modern national campaigns; they should expand to include more of those who have been through those campaigns.

That’s not just self-serving self-promotion from veteran campaign professionals who want a job, perhaps because they chose the wrong horse during the nomination fight – or from friends of theirs with access to prime Republican opinion space. It’s also a way of maintaining party discipline. Candidates who fill their campaign with staffers loyal only to them become presidents who fill their White Houses with staff loyal to them. And that means they may not be loyal to the party.

Fill the campaign with loyal, experienced Republicans, and you’ll wind up with a White House full of loyal Republicans with deep ties to the Republican Party network. That won’t always ensure that the president will always be loyal to the party, but it certainly helps.

All in all, there’s very little downside for most national Republicans to making a quick, strategic hit on the campaign right now. Again, that’s not to say that Bill Kristol, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, and any national Republicans they are in touch with are simply being strategic here. There’s no way to know that; it’s certainly possible that the timing of this had to do with disgruntlement about the Supreme Court healthcare decision, or frustration with the stagnating polls, or simply a lack of other news to write about during a slow news week. Still, it certainly fits with the incentives out there: A small-scale hit this week achieves several things for conservative pundits and for the Republican Party, and just doesn’t have a downside.

Yet Obama must show he understands the depth and breadth of this crisis, and that he is prepared to do large and bold things to turn the economy around in his second term if and when he does have the votes in Congress. So far, his proposals are policy miniatures relative to the size of the problem.

The real political test comes after Labor Day. Before Labor Day, Americans aren’t really focused on the upcoming election. After Labor Day, they focus like a laser. If the economy is moving in the right direction then — if unemployment is dropping and jobs are increasing — Obama has a good chance of being reelected. If the jobs doldrums continue — or worsen — he won’t be.

But the point is actually just to hammer Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom for being sort of feckless and horrible at messaging, and to let the Romney campaign know that the Journal will be telling them which things to say, thank you very much. (The conservative press is much better at bullying its candidates into adopting particular strategies and policies than the liberal press, which has approximately zero power over candidates and elected officials.)

This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign’s insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn’t been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.

The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that “Obama isn’t working.” Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.

Then! The Journal compares Romney to John Kerry. So mean!

Following this explosive editorial, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, America’s wrongest and dumbest partisan pundit, weighed in with his me-too “Romney’s strategy is all wrong” column, which has the very troll-y headline “Dukakis, Kerry … Romney?” Kristol wants to hear policy specifics from Romney, which is an awful idea, frankly, because Republican policies are pretty much universally unpopular once you go into actual detail, and Romney is correct in believing that his best hope is to remain as vague as possible on as many issues as possible.

But the argument is about a broader fear that a winnable election is slipping through the Republican Party’s grasp, and if that is indeed happening, Romney and his campaign are going to be blamed for letting it happen. As Josh Marshall says, columnists and pundits actually usually don’t have much of an idea what’s going on in a campaign. Conservatives are frustrated that Romney’s not kicking ass in the polls, and if he isn’t, it’s because his stupid campaign (made up of longtime Romney associates, for the most part) is stupid and bad.

It’s possible, though, that the Romney campaign is doing the absolute best it can running against an incumbent president who remains broadly personally popular. And it’s probable that Romney, for all his flaws, was the best candidate to face Obama this year. Buyer’s remorse aside, does anyone honestly think Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels or Tim Pawlenty or Chris Christie would be performing better right now?

As I said, the words of the WSJ editorial page carry weight, so we’ll see if Romney (who has already called the mandate a tax) makes some sort of gesture toward “shaking up” his campaign (which would lead, naturally, to headlines about his campaign being in disarray — it’s lose-lose!), but these guys are actually just whining about how it’s harder to beat Obama than they have always thought it ought to be.

And here’s the kicker: Kaiser found that the most popular parts of the law were also the ones most Americans weren’t aware of, and vice-versa. Almost everyone knows about the mandate, which most people don’t like, but fewer than half of those polled knew about the law’s tax credits for small businesses that offer their employees coverage, a provision that eight out of 10 people liked when they heard about it.

None of this should come as a surprise, given the level of mendacity of the law’s opponents. If the Affordable Care Act did in fact feature “death panels,” resulted in deep cuts to Medicare, represented a “massive” tax increase and “Sovietized” our healthcare system, nobody would support it. Fortunately, none of that bears any resemblance to reality.

Obviously, the law should be judged on what it actually contains, but according to Kaiser, six in 10 say they don’t have enough information about the details to understand how it will impact them personally. So here, in no particular order, are 10 things you may not know about the Affordable Care Act.

1. People Will Be Getting Checks

Call it a crazy hunch, but my guess is that the law will look a lot less tyrannical when people start getting checks in the mail to help pay for their insurance.

Folks making up to four times the federal poverty line will be eligible for subsidies. In 2012, that would mean a family of four making up to $92,200 (it’s a bit higher in Alaska) would see some cash.

Those subsidies will come in the form of “advanceable” tax credits, meaning that people won’t have to wait until they pay their taxes to get the cash, and they’ll be fully refundable, so those who don’t pay enough in federal income taxes will get a check in the mail from the IRS.

2. The Richest Americans Are Going to Pay More Taxes

Wealthy investors are outraged, but most people probably don’t know that a 3.8% surcharge on investment income – dividends and capital gains — kicks in this January for everyone with an adjusted gross income of over $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers). So those currently enjoying the lowest rate on investments in our nation’s history will pay for a decent chunk of the bill.

3. Insurers’ Overhead – and Profit Margins — Are Limited

For the past 18 months or so, insurers have been required to spend 85 percent of the premiums they collect on healthcare (80 percent for individual and small-group plans). If they spend less than that, they have to send their customers a rebate to cover the difference.

Forbes’ Rick Ungar called it, “the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.”

4. Much Ado About the Mandate

With the Supreme Court’s ruling last week, the mandate is gone, but the penalty for not carrying insurance remains. If there’s one thing Democrats, Republicans and independents agree on, it’s that they don’t like it.

And they shouldn’t. But most people probably don’t know just how modest the impact of the mandate really is. According to the Congressional Budget Office, just 1 percent of the population will pay the penalty, which maxes out at 1 percent of one’s income.

A lot of conservatives are convinced that jack-booted gummint thugs will round them up and stick them in FEMA camps if they don’t pay up. But as Timothy Noah points out, “the health reform law explicitly states (on Page 336): ‘In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.’” They can only dock future tax refunds.

5. And Nobody Ever Talks About the Employer Mandate

Starting in 2014, companies with 50 or more full-time workers (two part-timers count as one full-timer for this purpose) will have to pay penalties if they don’t cover their employees’ health insurance. (This provision is a bit complicated — all the details are here.)

6. Shaves the Deficit

Mitt Romnney says that “Obamacare adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt, and pushes those obligations onto coming generations.”

That message appears to be sinking in. According to Kaiser, a majority of Americans – and a third of Democrats – think the healthcare law will increase the deficit. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the law will reduce the projected deficit by $210 billion over the next decade.

7. Chicks Will Dig This

Many people are aware of the regulation requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. It’s one of the most popular parts of the whole. But fewer know that, beginning in 2014, insurers won’t be able to charge women higher premiums than men.

Also coming in 2014: a ban on insurers placing annual limits on healthcare (lifetime coverage limits were already banned in 2010).

The Kaiser poll found that few people were aware of another popular new insurance regulation: since 2010, insurance companies can no longer charge co-pays or hold you to a deductible for preventive health services.

8. New Dollars for Community Health Centers

Kaiser didn’t ask for people’s opinions on this one, but it may be one of those under-the-radar provisions that actually ends up helping a lot of people.

Community health centers (CHCs) now serve the primary care needs of about 20 million Americans, and they have a proven track record. But the system is strained and underfunded.

The expansion of Medicaid will help alleviate some of the pressure, and the healthcare law also allocates $11 billion over a five-year period to build new CHCs and upgrade existing infrastructure. Most of the dollars will end up in poorer communities.

A lot of underserved people live in rural America, and the law also provides money to train and place 16,000 primary caregivers in rural communities over a five-year period.

9. Essential Benefits

Starting in 2014, in order for insurers to sell coverage through state-based exchanges – a place where a lot of the newly insured will likely end up – they will be required to cover a package of “essential benefits,” including maternity care, mental healthcare and substance abuse treatment, pediatric care, ambulance rides and hospitalization.

They don’t have to if they don’t want to participate in the exchanges, yet this measure is, according to many, at the heart of the supposed “government takeover” of our healthcare system.

10. It’s Not So Easy to Repeal

There is no doubt that we’ll hear lots of Republicans blustering about how they’ll repeal Obamacare on day one if they win the White House and the Senate, but it’s a lot less clear that they’d actually follow through.

As Igor Volsky notes, unless the Republicans were to win both the White House and a huge number of senate seats, they “can do little more than weaken Obamacare’s regulations and defund some of its provisions.” They also have nothing to replace it with, and would own our screwed up healthcare system for a generation. And they’d lose an issue that fires up the conservative base. They will, however, do their best to gum up the works as the law is implemented.

The takeaway to all of this is that the healthcare law is only going to get more popular as it’s provisions kick in. People will see some tangible benefits, and the fearmongering will prove unfounded.

Like the idea of government itself, people are suspicious of the Affordable Care Act as an abstraction, but when it gets to the specifics they tend to like it a lot better.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.

This is true – though the Court’s decision has nothing to do with it. Anything that has a significant impact on federal revenues or spending, such as fees, interest on student loans, or mining licenses, can be changed using the budget reconciliation process. The mandate, and some other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, can certainly be stripped out by a Republican majority. Other provisions that don’t affect the budget, such as some of the requirements placed on insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions and keep young adults on their parents’ plans, probably can’t be, because their effect on federal finances is minimal.

So if Romney wins the presidency and Republicans capture the Senate (as seems likely, if Romney wins), at the very least, we can expect them to repeal the individual mandate, right? It’s the least popular element of the law, and not too difficult to sever from the rest. As Paul Starr of Princeton and The American Prospect has argued for years, a mandate with minimal enforcement mechanisms might be worse than no mandate at all.

Whether they do that or not will be an interesting case study in the role of money in politics. Health insurance companies and HMOs, after all, are mainstays of the Republican money machine. Aetna, the health insurer that spends the most on lobbying, recently bolstered its Republican bona fides by being the first public corporation to disclose recent contributions to Republican dark-money committees, the American Action Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s political arm. Aetna’s former CEO, Ronald Williams, even went so far as to renounce the company’s long-standing support for the mandate, predicting it would fall at the Supreme Court.

But for health insurers like Aetna, stripping out the mandate alone would be the worst possible outcome. It would mean that they would still have to take all applicants, and couldn’t reject or charge more to people with preexisting conditions. And they wouldn’t have the profits from younger, healthier customers. Ideally, companies like Aetna would like to have the mandate without any of the other reforms, but that’s a political non-starter, since individuals would be mandated to buy something that the insurers would refuse to sell them. Failing that, the insurers could live with the Affordable Care Act, or the pre-ACA status quo. But what they can’t live with is the insurance reforms alone, without a mandate. (As a spokesperson for America’s Health Insurance Plans told Reuters, “There has always been broad agreement that the insurance market reforms… cannot work without universal coverage.”)

And you can be pretty sure that they won’t have to. By deepening their alliance with the Republican Party, Aetna and other insurers have made sure they would be at the table, whether the Court overturned the mandate (in which case the insurers’ goal would be to undo the rest of the law) or upheld it.

Some Republicans, including Romney, promise to repeal the whole law and “replace” it with something better, often suggesting that the replacement would include the popular provisions on preexisting conditions. That, too, is a non-starter with the party’s cash constituents. And other Republican proposals, such as to allow insurance companies to sell across state lines – that is, evade state regulations – aren’t ready for prime time. Republicans never offered an alternative during the health care debate and they don’t have one now.

Thus you have McConnell’s careful lowering of expectations on Monday: “It’s a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it.” The Republicans will talk about repealing “Obamacare” for as long as it succeeds in firing up their base. But it’s all cheap talk; they won’t do a thing.

And so, the Affordable Care Act is secure. Unfortunately, that has less to do with public opinion or the Constitution than the simple power of money in politics.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

And with Thursday’s ruling, the government can no longer mandate that you carry insurance, it can only levy a small tax on those who don’t. The real-world impact of that? Only an estimated 1 percent of the population will face the tax – a tax that maxes out at 1 percent – and it may not even be enforceable!

But for the Right, a moderate expansion of health coverage and some new insurance regulations are, simply put, the worst things that ever happened. How bad is it? Well imagine that in the midst of the Holocaust, a meteor crashed to earth, destroying the entire planet. And as planet Earth exploded, it opened up a tear in the space-time continuum that swallowed up the entire galaxy. Thursday’s ruling was, apparently, almost that bad.

For your reading pleasure, we’ve collected some of the most hilariously over-the-top freakouts we’ve seen. Enjoy!

1. Totally Not Exaggerating!

Baby-faced Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro offers a coolly dispassionate analysis of yesterday’s ruling…

@benshapiro

This is the greatest destruction of individual liberty since Dred Scott. This is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration.

28 Jun 12

2. Wait Until They Discover That They Use the Metric System

BuzzFeed found a bunch of conservatives so freaked out by this tyranny that they’re throwing in the towel and heading north to that right-wing paradise known as Canada – a place that has both universal healthcare and gay marriage …

@JacquaFlocka

God literally fuck this. I’m moving to Canada. Jump off a cliff@obama.

28 Jun 12

3. Health Insurance Is So Much Worse Than the Murder of 3,000 People

It’s a good thing Mike Pence is a reasonable conservative.

In a closed-door House GOP meeting Thursday, Indiana congressman and gubernatorial candidate Mike Pence likened the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Democratic healthcare law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to several sources present.

He immediately apologized.

4. Grab Your Musket and Tri-Corner Hat!

Did you know that the Founding Fathers fought a revolution to keep people uninsured. It’s true!

Wonkette:

Now that poors can get health insurance because the demon Supreme Court sided with that commie muslin NOBAMA fella, the only way to defend our freedom is armed insurrection! Mount up and ride to the sound of the gun, says former Michigan Republican Party spokesman Matthew Davis.

Matthew Davis, an attorney in Lansing, sent the email moments after the Supreme Court ruling to numerous new media outlets and limited government activists with the headline: “Is Armed Rebellion Now Justified?”

Davis added his own personal note saying, “… here’s my response. And yes, I mean it.”

“There are times government has to do things to get what it wants and holds a gun to your head,” Davis said. “I’m saying at some point, we have to ask the question when do we turn that gun around and say no and resist.

5. Revolution Is in the Air

Davis wasn’t alone. Here’s Matthew Vadum, author of Zombie Acorn Is Coming to Eat Your Face!

Matthew Vadum@<strong>vadum

We don’t just need a new president. We need a revolution.#tcot

28 Jun 12

6. A Constitutional Scholar He Is Not…

Rand Paul really needs to peruse Article 3…

Politico:

Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t think the Supreme Court gets the last word on what’s constitutional.

The Kentucky Republican belittled the high court’s healthcare decision as the flawed opinion of just a “couple people.”

“Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional,” the freshman lawmaker said in a statement.

7. Health Insurance Is Exactly Like Slavery

It’s not just Ben Shapiro – Richard Viguerie, a stalwart of the conservative movement since the Goldwater days, also reminisced about Dred Scott.

Today, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court of the United States – the body the Framers of the Constitution created to protect the citizenry from tyranny – has chosen to join infamous courts of the past, such as the Taney Court that made the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision finding that slaves had no rights and the Fuller Court that ruled to institutionalize Jim Crow discrimination in Plessy v. Ferguson in stripping Americans of their freedom.

8. You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Angry

An unspoken virtue of Obamacare is that it might just make Glenn Beck’s head explode. From his site, The Blaze:

Needless to say, the news [of the ruling] went over like a lead balloon with Glenn Beck and his radio co-hosts Pat and Stu — so much so that they nearly violated FCC language requirements.

When Beck and his team found out that it was in fact Roberts’ decision that pushed the bill through, they were visibly and audibly stunned. Beck surmised that the reason for Roberts’ decision likely hinges on the pervasive nature of progressivism.

“Progressivism is a disease and it is in both parties,” Beck said.

“Progressives are fascists.”

Beck, looking on the one positive he feels to have come from this decision, said that the “Lord works in mysterious ways.”

OK, Glenn Beck.

9. John Roberts: Traitor!

Every fundamentalist religion abhors apostates, and American conservatism is no exception. As Alex Seitz-Wald detailed in Salon, the chief justice was treated to an abundance of bile.

“It’s patently absurd,” seethed Seton Motley, a conservative activist with LessGovernment.org. “This is the umpire calling the game for the first five innings, and then putting on a cap and glove and play first base…

“I have a message for Chief Justice Roberts,” Dean Clancy of the Tea Party group Freedomworks declared over the loudspeaker after the ruling came down. “The power to tax is the power to destroy”…

Bryan Fischer, the prominent Christian-right activist, toldBuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray that Roberts “is going down in history as the justice that shredded the Constitution and turned it into a worthless piece of parchment.”

10. Or Is He?

Unlike most constitutional experts, some conservative bloggers thought that the law was so obviously unconstitutional that something fishy must be going on…

Someone got to Roberts. I bet they got to him and told him he has to vote this way or members of his family – kids, wife, parents, whoever – were going to be killed.

Later this afternoon, it’s going to come out that Roberts was coerced. … the whole story will come out, Roberts will issue his REAL opinion, and Obama and Axelrod will be taken away in handcuffs.

Hey, one can always hope!

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.