As this chart from Pollster shows, President Obama hasn’t had much success in getting public support for his health care reform plan:
Coincidentally, and perhaps not surprisingly, the decline in support for his health care plan has mirrored his declining approval numbers:
At this point, it seems clear that Obama and the Democrats are going to have to make significant concessions to get any package at all through Congress. The public option is, most likely, dead, as are some of the more controversial aspects of the plan that have been made public — such as insurance regulations that, if implemented, would significantly harm the market for private health insurance. In the end, what I’m guessing will see is some kind of reform, much more modest than what Obama wanted and nowhere near what he promised during the campaign.
And that’s the best case scenario for Obama in my opinion. If, by some chance, the entire effort collapse and, as in 1994, we see no bill at all voted out of Congress, it will be a significant setback for his Presidency.
This was inevitable. You can’t shock the hell out of people with a barrage of expensive new programs, day after day, program after program, and expect them not to start pushing back. Seems to me that the haste to get things dome in the first 100 days, or whateverthehell they’re doing, guarantees a hostile congress and public for the rest of your term.