Drew Westen: Why the President Has Been Losing on Health Care, and What He Needs to Say

[depakid]

Pundits have offered a range of reasons for why health reform that was wildly popular and on which the President and two houses of Congress were elected has turned so far south in public opinion: The White House overlearned the lessons of the Clintons by letting a dysfunctional Congress try to create the legislation on their own. The President failed to lay out a clear plan and only suggested a set of principles. The White House emphasized cost, when most people who vote are more concerned with security and stability of their insurance and when the emphasis on cost ultimately drew attention to the weakest link in the effort to reform health care. The White House didn't stay on message.

True enough. But none of these gets at the root of them all: The White House didn't stay on message because it didn't really have one.

All it takes to understand why things have gone as they have is to ask two simple questions. First, "What story has the administration told the American people about what the problem is, what caused it, and how the cause naturally leads to a particular solution?" And second, "What story have the Republicans told about 'Obamacare' and why it's the wrong medicine?" When you ask those two questions, it's obvious why nearly 70 percent of Americans now say they are confused by the whole debate.

The GOP story is simple, memorable, and values-driven. It is a variant of the story conservatives have told and retold so many times since Ronald Reagan famously asserted that "government is the problem, not the solution" and "Democrats have never seen a social program they didn't want to fund or a tax they didn't want to raise."

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Note the difference between the Republican's narrative, even when the GOP is at an all-time low ebb and the administration started with sky-high public support and good will. The Republican story has antagonists and protagonists. It has motives. It lays out the dangers in a really compelling (if not always accurate) way. It doesn't do a good job of laying out solutions, which would make it a much better story. But its "solution" draws on the familiar theme that the free market, if truly unfettered, would solve all our problems--a theme the administration has not, remarkably, bothered to attack, even after the financial meltdown that swept it into office.

In short, the Republican story has what psychologists call narrative coherence. It's a story. The administration, in contrast, has no real story. It isn't even clear on what it's trying to reform--health care for those without it? health care for those with it? health insurance (the latest formulation, at least until Wednesday night)?

So with all the time the White House had to develop and test a narrative they could be assured would win by 25 points before they ever rolled anything out (something I can tell you with certainty is possible to do, because I led the messaging efforts of the major health reform nonprofits in 2008 to develop just such narratives, and we had several that beat anything conservatives could throw at us), why didn't it? And why doesn't the average American know that the Republicans have been fighting every effort to make health care affordable and available for Americans for over half a century (using precisely the same arguments they are using now), just like they fought Social Security (and called it, too, "socialism") 70 years ago?

One possible explanation is that it's hard to offer a coherent story if you aren't committed to the elements of your own plot. But there's another reason, which is the same reason the President had a tough time explaining to the American people why a massive stimulus was essential to get us off the precipice after Bush had taken us to the edge, and why deficits were not only going to be with us for a few years but for the next two or three at least were going to be good policy, not something to apologize for: It's impossible to tell a coherent story when you just can't get yourself to blame anyone for anything, no matter how much damage they've done to people's lives (except an occasional rebuke to "the left" to stop making trouble for bipartisan champions of reform like Chuck Grassley).

Pointing fingers just makes this President uncomfortable. He'd rather give away a few hundred billion dollars to the pharmaceutical industry than to take them on, even if that means he may have to tax the middle class to make up the difference--and cost dozens of House seats in the process, by putting Democrats in districts that shouldn't have been vulnerable into the bind of choosing between losing because they undercut health care reform and losing because they broke the promises they made along with the promise to enact it.

MUCH more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-the-president-has-bee_b_278971.html

Drew Westen is a Psychologist and neuroscientist at Emory University

[Skittles]

1. it's been fucking dismal

and DUers are still making excuses

[ima_sinnic]

2. K&R