Just because the Super Bowl is over doesn't mean there's no football going on in this country. Quite the contrary, we're in a hard-fought football game right now between the Republicans and the Democrats. Now the scoring in this game is a little different. No one is going to score 43 points like the Seahawks did on Sunday. The most you can score in this game is 3.
You can get one point for winning the White House, one for winning the Senate and one for winning the House.
So the bad news is that, right now, the Republicans trail 2-1. The good news is that we only just finished the first quarter, which was the year 2013. The game lasts four years and is divided into four quarters. The second quarter is 2014, and the mid-term elections will take us to halftime. The good news is that the Republicans have a very strong opportunity to take a point away from the Democrats by hanging onto the House and taking the Senate as we close out the first half.
A lot of people are already obsessed with 2016. It's not time for that yet! A coach isn't looking ahead to the fourth quarter of a game when the second quarter is still being played. We need to score points now, before halftime!
So let's look at each team's game plan. Right now, the Republicans have the ball and the Democrats are on defense. What does the Democrats' defense consist of? Mainly distractions, such as "income inequality," the debt ceiling fight, extending jobless benefits, immigration, Benghazi denial, claims that the economy is recovering and it's just a little slow (ha!) and claims that there is "not a smidgen of corruption" at the IRS, which makes one wonder why Lois Lerner keeps taking the Fifth, but never mind that now. And of course, Democrats' insistence that ObamaCare is merely experiencing a few glitches.
That's their defense.
What's in the Republicans' offensive playbook? Replacing ObamaCare, of course, but also job creation, fights over the budget, spending, the debt ceiling, the size of the bureaucracy, the politicization of the Department of Justice - and yes, the immigration hot potato.
Immigration is a tricky play. If Republicans aren't careful, they could fumble that one to the Democrats just like they fumbled the government shutdown. The problem with that play was not that the Republicans were wrong. It was in the execution of the play. You have to do more than be right. You also have to control the narrative, and Republicans typically don't do that very well because those cheerleaders over on the Democrats' sidelines are the mainstream media.
But Democrats have committed turnovers too. They've already thrown too crucial interceptions in the game. One was ObamaCare itself. The second was the ObamaCare lies, which caused them to lose big-time yardage when the voters figured out that they couldn't keep their plans or their doctors despite what they'd been promised.
The voters are going to decide who goes into the locker room at halftime with a 2-1 lead. If Republicans can take that point away from the Democrats, it will present us with immediate benefits - no more letting Harry Reid control the Senate - but it will also put the Republicans in a stronger position to ultimately win the game 3-0 by making sure that Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat does not succeed Obama when the game moves to the fourth quarter.
In the NFL, a 3-0 game is a pretty low-scoring affair. In this game, 3-0 would represent a huge win. And the fate of the nation is at stake, so the Republicans can ill-afford to fail in either their game planning or their execution. This is the Super Bowl of America's future.
