Democrats think that healthcare reform is in trouble because the Obama Administration has been strategically inept and the Republicans are playing dirty. Republicans think the reform effort is in trouble because the American people are rejecting it. Both sides are right.
There is no doubt that the reform effort is in big trouble. Support for the plan varies among polls, but pretty much every pollster agrees that support for Congressional plans has fallen dramatically. But the bigger indication of trouble is the collapse of support for Democrats in general and the President in particular and the corresponding rebound for Republicans. Here is a chart from Rasmussen:
This chart tracks the "Presidential Approval Index," which compares those who strongly approve of the job the President is doing with those who strongly disapprove. As the chart shows, Obama went from a very favorable index to a very unfavorable one, a dramatic reversal of fortunes in a pretty short time.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates are leading in two important gubernatorial races to be decided this fall: Virginia and New Jersey. New Jersey for heaven's sake! Current polls show that Senate leader Harry Reid is in danger in his home state. Of course, all this may reverse by next year, but right now the Democrats are deep in the poop. We don't need to ask whether healthcare reform is the problem because we have seen all this before.
Have some critics of healthcare reform been playing dirty? Yes. The "death panel" argument being pushed by Sarah Palin goes way beyond any evidence in the various plans. But such strategies rarely have much effect. Most would not take this sort of thing seriously unless they were already angry and anxious and looking for reasons to oppose the plan.
The Administration has to take most of the blame, as many Democrats realize. Peter Nicholas, Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has this:
Democratic strategists say the Obama administration's evolving, abstract arguments for healthcare reform are backfiring and contributing to a decline in public support for the legislation.
The strategists, many of whom saw healthcare reform fail in the Clinton administration, contend that President Obama has advanced too many rationales for his plan, leaving people confused.
That's a very nice way of saying that the Administration can't get its story straight. Why it been so difficult for President Obama and his team to present a coherent and consistent case for reform? Another bit from Rasmussen provides a clue.
Without the public option, just 50% of Democrats support the legislation. That's down from 69% support measured a week ago. But here the enthusiasm gap is especially strong. A week ago, polling found that 44% of Democrats Strongly favored the reform plan. Without the public option, just 12% of Democrats Strongly support it.
There would be a lot of serious obstacles facing any reform effort. To have a chance of success, one might begin by asking what are the problems with the current system, how can they be solved, and how can the solutions be sold to the public? For the core of the Democratic Party, the first two steps were hardly necessary. They know that the real problem is the lack of a single payer system, and that such a system is obviously the solution. That is where decades of passion direct them.
Unfortunately for them, that passion is not widely shared. The public might be willing to accept a public option, or even single payer, if it promised to deliver enough benefits at a reasonable cost; but they have no emotional attachment to the idea and many are frankly suspicious of it to begin with. The result of this is a disconnect between the arguments the Administration employed to sell its proposals, and the goal to which their base is passionately attached. That explains the meandering rationales for reform.
The Administration has squandered an enormous reserve of political capital in a very short time. Maybe a dramatic economic rebound in on the horizon, one big enough to restore public confidence in the Democratic Party. But it seems silly to have put themselves in a position where they have to hope for that.
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