DEMOCRATS MANNING THE LIFEBOATS – AT 9:52 A.M. ET:  We've reported on the growing list of congressional Dems who are abandoning Obama on the Keystone pipeline issue. 

Now there's another list being written – Dems defecting on Obamacare.  What will this cost the president?  From Investor's Business Daily:

Perhaps Democrats know something the rest of us don't about Barack Obama's political fortunes. What else explains the increasing numbers who are openly defying the president on two key election issues?

The notoriously thin-skinned Obama could not have been happy with the news last week that, as the Hill newspaper put it, "an increasing number of Democrats are taking potshots at President Obama's health care law."

North Carolina's Brad Miller, who voted for the law, now laments that "we would all have been better off" if Congress had dealt with more pressing issues "and then came back to health care."

Barney Frank complained that the Democrats "paid a terrible price for health care." And Virginia's outgoing Sen. Jim Webb said the law would be Obama's "biggest downside" in the election and had cost him "a lot of credibility as a leader."

Meanwhile, stalwart Massachusetts liberal Elizabeth Warren is now calling to repeal a piece of ObamaCare — the 2.3% tax on medical devices — because, she says, it "disproportionately impacts the small companies with the narrowest financial margins."

There are many of those companies in Massachusetts.

Warren, by the way, is running for the Senate seat occupied by Republican Scott Brown, whose victory in 2010 was a result of the public's intense opposition to ObamaCare.

Former Alabama Rep. Artur Davis went furthest. "I think the Affordable Care Act is the single least popular piece of major domestic legislation in the last 70 years," he said. "It was not popular when it passed; it's less popular now." Ouch.

COMMENT:  Republicans can make hay on Obamacare, but only if they come up with a credible alternative that has popular support.  They cannot simply be against something, especially a health-care plan.

Obamacare, Keystone, a stalled economy – there's a laundry list of policies on which Obama is vulnerable.  But you may be sure that his team is working hard on ways to use these issues against Romney.  And the attacks on Romney will be relentless.  My sense is that he's ready.  He's organized an excellent campaign.  This can be won.

April 23, 2012