Digby's Blog On Healthcare: "The Real Problem With Obama's Poll Numbers"...

[BlooInBloo]

Because it's *always* a good time for an episode of What Digby Said (even though it's actually dday.)

My big takeaway today is supposed to be that Barack Obama is fading in selling his health care plan, as eroding poll numbers, both on health care and his job approval rating, threaten legislation in the coming year. As references to "Obamacare" rise, some blame the President for a poor sales job with health care legislation. I fault the President, but for different reasons.

Right now Obama is simply a captive to Congressional process. That process is messy, it's easy to view it as negative, and people are in general reacting to the ups and downs that wound the possibility of passing a bill. The President has no bill to go out and hawk because the Congress is deep into negotiations, so he's selling nothing, a difficult task for anyone. You could say that Obama should have just stepped in and laid down the law, but not only has that proven to fail in the 1993-94 Clinton health care plan, but I don't necessarily want executive dictates to trump Congressional process. I think there's a lot of unnecessary bottlenecks in Congressional process, like the undemocratic filibuster and the seniority system for Committee chairs (particularly in the Senate) and the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate itself. But in general, we don't elect emperors, and checks and balances are by and large healthy, and I'm OK with Congress performing their task of coming up with legislation and the President performing his task of executing it. Obviously he has some input, but I don't want an executive dominating the process. The paradox of this is that, since people generally believe that a President can just walk in and magically implement his policies, his personal approval is getting dragged down by the slog of health care bills in Congress.

The other wall that Obama is running into has been described for years as the Two Santa Claus theory. For 30 years and more, the American people have been sold on the idea that they can have unlimited services and endlessly low taxes. Somehow the lower taxes generate enough revenue to cover all the services they desire. This was part of a Republican ideological project begun by Reagan aides to basically force Democrats into wearing the black hats, and it has turned into doctrine from then on.

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I agree that the President needs to do better in selling his plans to the public. A speech in prime-time, not a press conference but an actual speech, complete with Ross Perot graphs if necessary, as Nate Silver advocates, sounds like a good idea. But his problem is more about American political ideology than the ins and outs of this bill. America elected a Democrat because they didn't like George Bush. But they didn't elect a liberal ideology, even if they may agree with it on many points, because a liberal ideology wasn't on offer. Nobody in the Democratic Party has pushed back against the Two Santa Claus theory, or offered up a competing theory of their own, in the thirty-plus years since it was invented.

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Unless and until we start challenging conservative ideology and not conservative candidates, we will always have trouble making major changes because the public has swallowed a notion of government that makes no logical or coherent sense.