AT MEETINGS on Cap- itol Hill for the last several months, I have warned GOP and other conservative leaders not to try to run this important presidential election on a two-legged stool that excludes social issues. My warnings have been ignored.

GOP chiefs and conservative groups maintained an almost 100 percent certainty that they could win the White House, take the Senate, and hold the House on economic issues alone. One key economic issue in what they thought was a full arsenal was Obamacare. From the Heritage Foundation to the Speaker's office there arose a cockiness that the Supreme Court would side against the law's insurance mandate. A major part of the GOP campaign plan was to use this defeat to blame Obama for "wasting time" on an unconstitutional law instead of fixing the economy.

While conservatives can continue to beat the Obamacare drum, they now have a problem. The very conservative chief justice, John Roberts, wrote the decision that Obamacare was constitutional. What now? Impeach Roberts?

I feared that Roberts or another conservative on the court would approve the mandate because its concept probably originated in a 1989 paper produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Republicans in 1993 twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health-insurance mandate. Democrats and Republicans introduced a bipartisan bill with the mandate in 2007. While nothing like the overreaching nature of Obamacare was proposed, the mandate continued to circulate in GOP circles until it was claimed by Obama.

This is why I did not believe Obamacare should be foundational in a purely "it's the economy" campaign. Without a campaign plan that includes social conservatives there can be no GOP majority. Yet the social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage, have been set aside by economic conservatives in the GOP who hope to return to their glory days when Richard Nixon was president. The economic conservatives want a pre-Reagan party without all the parading pro-lifers, "gay bashers," and other "religious nuts." They thought that with the economy bad and most people hating Obamacare, the social conservatives brought into the GOP by Reagan could finally be discarded.