The Many Faces of Kay Hagan

The Tar Heel Democrat, eager to retain her Senate seat, tries a series of political makeovers.

 

Defying physics, ObamaCare has managed to create energies where none existed before: confusion over policies, anger over lost doctors, panic over costs. Most amazing has been the law's ability to produce entirely new Washington life forces. The scientific formula goes like this: Another day + Another ObamaCare disaster = A New Kay Hagan.

Back in 2008, North Carolinians were introduced to Bipartisan Kay, a hope-and-change candidate who argued that Sen. Elizabeth Dole was a lackey for a partisan George W. Bush. "It is time for someone to reach across party lines," explained Bipartisan Kay. "Voting 92% of time with the president . . . doesn't work here in North Carolina." She won.

By early 2009, ObamaCare already was working its weird science, producing within a few months the All-In-For-Obama Kay. The freshman senator embraced the president's partisan bill, provided a crucial Senate vote, promised two dozen times that those who liked their plan could keep it, and explained that the law would create jobs. All-In Kay lasted quite a while. As recently as August she was insisting that there were "a lot of positives" in the Affordable Care Act, and that she'd "be honored" to have President Obama campaign for her re-election in 2014.

Then came the great ObamaCare meltdown of October. Overnight, the North Carolina senator's office became home to Frustrated (And Not My Fault) Kay. It was "unacceptable," she said, that North Carolinians couldn't enroll in new plans. Frustrated Kay was eager to explain that this was an implementation problem, and moreover the fault of an Obama administration that "must improve their communications with the American people."

When frustration didn't help the ObamaCare website or her falling approval ratings, North Carolina met Fix It Kay, who joined a handful of Democrats to reassure voters that they would solve all this by demanding "common-sense changes" to the law. She called on the administration to extend the enrollment period. She announced her support for a bill to force insurers to "allow people to keep their current plans." She explained that "I've always said that this law would require fixes," even as she insisted it had many good parts.

The fixes went nowhere, and so out of the ashes marched Outraged Kay. She had found the culprits behind the ObamaCare mess (and no, they were not the Democrats who'd passed the law).

Outraged Kay vowed to hold "the insurance companies accountable" for canceling plans (the plans ObamaCare forced them to cancel). Outraged Kay also called for a "full investigation" into the contractors behind the website. "Taxpayers are owed a full and transparent accounting of how vendors . . . failed to launch this site successfully," she told reporters.

That worked for a bit, helped by Mr. Obama's mid-November decision to "let" insurers keep offering their old plans, and a holiday lull in headlines. And so came the fleeting appearance of Cautiously Optimistic That the Worst Is Over Kay.

True, 473,000 North Carolinians had received cancellation notices, and fewer than 9,000 had enrolled in ObamaCare by the end of November. Yet asked in a Politico interview if she'd back the law again, Cautiously Optimistic Kay pronounced: "Yeah, I would vote for it again."

But wait. The New Year brought a resurgence of bad headlines; the news that statehouse Republicans in North Carolina were investigating ObamaCare's effect on the state, a new round of conservative ads slamming Cautiously Optimistic Kay for her continued ObamaCare support, and slamming Bipartisan Kay for voting with Mr. Obama 96% of the time.

Runaway Kay emerged. She decided it was now officially time to flee the boss. Runaway Kay holed up in Washington when Mr. Obama came to Raleigh in mid-January.

The January state of the union, boring though it was, did produce a new strategy for Democrats, and with it a whole new reincarnation: Change the Subject Kay. For several weeks, this Kay Hagan has been spinning the inequality theme, claiming that "desperate" and wealthy special interests (specifically the Koch brothers) want to "buy" her seat so they can ruin Social Security and Medicare and hurt the "middle class" she wants to protect.

An outside liberal group, Patriot Majority USA, is meanwhile running ads against one of her GOP opponents, state House Speaker Thom Tillis, that take up the war-on-women theme. Its ad claims Mr. Tillis wants to "raise rates for women needing mammograms," even as it carefully avoids mentioning ObamaCare.

Change the Subject Kay chimed in this week with an MSNBC interview in which she charged that her Republican opponents want to "ban contraception." She was meanwhile back to claiming that ObamaCare is "something whose time has come."

Kay Hagan is hardly the only vulnerable Senate Democrat engaged in reinvention. Democrats have been cycling through damage-control approaches at the speed of light. Whether or not they can hit on one that sticks may decide not just control of the Senate, but potentially the fate of ObamaCare. The problem for North Carolina voters, however, is they've got to be wondering just which Kay Hagan they'd be electing.