BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Just imagine if George III had told the colonists that he would delay for one whole year the implementation of the Stamp Act, the tax that Parliament imposed on the colonies to pay for its worldwide war against the French.

Do you think the colonists would have decided to pack it in and not break away from England?

In many ways, the Obama Administration is trying to do just that with its suspension of an Obamacare mandate on the business community.

The White House is giving employers a year reprieve, as if a year is going to make much of difference for most business operations.

The President is doing this for a simple reason. He believes that if Obamacare is fully implemented in the next six months, it will prove to be very unpopular with the American people and that Congressional Democrats will lose ground in their efforts to take the House and possibly lose the Senate.

The problem with delaying this one part of the bill is that it part of a greater whole. You screw up the business mandate, well, then you make it harder for insurance companies to participate in the exchanges, and when you make it harder for insurance companies to participate, well, then all of those poor suckers (mostly young adults) who will face a fine if they don’t buy insurance, will have no private insurance to buy.

You take away one portion of Obamacare, and then, the whole thing collapses.

The President thinks he is smarter than everybody else, and he makes bold policy promises based purely on political considerations.

He promised to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan because he thought it made a nice campaign ad. And it did. But Iraq is a bigger mess because of it, and Afghanistan is more screwed up because the President gave the Taliban our timetable when we are going to pull out of there.

The White House is now delaying this key part of their most important achievement because they are worried primarily about the politics. Oh, and of course, the fact that the law is nowhere near ready to be implemented because of sheer incompetence by this Administration.

The President can run but he can’t hide from his singular achievement. He can hope that the American people are so stupid that just because this business mandate is pushed back after next year’s election, that they won’t notice and won’t punish the Democrats.

But the fact of the matter is that Obamacare is not popular with the voters, and it is not getting any more popular. And creating more uncertainty with this law is not going to help settle down the job creation market. More uncertainty won’t help the business community. More uncertainty won’t help economic growth.

Voters in the next election know that Obamacare is still coming, unless they do something dramatic to repeal it. And they won’t get there by voting for the President’s Congressional allies in 2014.

Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.