Sick of This Place – Slapstick
You’re going to hear a lot in the upcoming days/weeks from folks on both sides about the poll numbers on health care reform. The Republican spin obviously is that the public doesn’t want ‘government takeover’ of health care, etc. etc. There’s a bigger point I want to make in a second, but at least on this talking point it’s also important to simply remind everyone that a lot of the “anti-health care reform” people are those who don’t like the current bill because it’s not radical enough. That doesn’t make them supporters of the bill of course, but it does offer some texture that the GOP spinners don’t want to address.
Which brings me to the other side. The left-wing folks who seem insistent on killing the bill now that it’s been Liebermanized. Those folks, in fact, themselves make up a pretty big percentage of the numbers that have switched from pro to con in the last few weeks.
The risk, of course, is that this ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are angry right now, but if they were left in a media vacuum for a few days I think a lot (not all, of course, but a lot) would back down a bit, recognize that this bill is more than would have fit into the wildest hopes for Democrats five years ago, and support it. But if they start to see polling which ‘confirms’ that the country at large is opposed, suddenly the impulse to swallow the compromise feels a lot less urgent.
However, this is a classic Keyser Soze move right here (“the biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist”). It’s not a coincidence that the far left is going to latch onto an argument that the right will also be trying to push.
I’ve insisted all along that health care reform is not going to look popular when it finally comes to a vote. This is an inevitable function of the legislative process. As I wrote two months ago:
There are just structural elements of this process (a deeply ingrained status quo bias being the most powerful) which mean that the side proposing change is going to do worse and worse in the polls the closer it comes to actually passing something.
People love ‘change’ when it’s abstract, but the more particular it gets, the scarier it becomes. This is to be expected. The job of legislators is not to freak out too much about public opinion in the short-term. If you drill down to just a single moment, you’ll get a far less useful understanding of the situation than if you recognize the rolling and fundamentally temporal nature of social attitudes.
There’s every chance that ‘health care reform’ will be polling under 50% when this thing finally comes to the floor. What Democratic legislators need to understand is that a few years down the road people will have become accustomed to their new levels of health coverage and things will be well on their way to turning the 2009 health care bill into another third rail.
It’s very easy to start thinking that the current downturn in support for health care reform represents some unique and meaningful event. That it demonstrates how right it would be to kill this version and demand something more. But, it’s important to remember that this is not an unexpected turn of events. Even more, it’s important to remember that this is precisely what those who are allied against Health Care Reform As Such want us to think.
If health care dies because the left latched onto this argument as a reason to give up, then I will truly begin to buy into the idea that our side is fundamentally incapable of governing itself.