Hit the brakes on health-care bill, say two top Dem pollsters
Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen are pollsters for the last two non-GOP U.S. Presidents – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively. So it’s revealing that a commentary in today’s Washington Post by Caddell and Schoen urges Democratic leaders to drop their current effort to ram the Senate-passed health-care bill through the House of Representatives and follow up with a “reconciliation” bill that end-runs a Republican filibuster:
Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November . . . the battle for public opinion has been lost . . . Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. . . . Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data. . . . The notion that once enactment is forced, the public will suddenly embrace health-care reform could not be further from the truth . . . Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November.
Remember, these are Democrats talking – Democrats selected for their expert political olfaction by the rough-and-tumble Darwinian dogfights known as electioneering. And it sounds like they’re saying, “Just. Walk. Away.”
Caddell and Schoen conclude that several points on which both parties agree can be salvaged from the wreckage of the current legislation and stitched together in a much less partisan bill.
March 12th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Caddell and Schoen aren’t exactly Democrats. Were they, their “argument”–a rehashing of GOP talking points, and not even an especially good one–wouldn’t be any more persuasive. See Ed Kilgore for more detail: http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2010/03/false_friends.php. This is a nonstory.
March 14th, 2010 at 7:10 am
Keep telling yourself that Kevin! You sound just like the Democratic leadership, “The polls are wrong, everybody will love it once it’s past…trust us”
Good luck with that!
March 14th, 2010 at 10:31 am
Kilgore’s reaction (and yours, Kevin) simply illustrates Caddell’s and Schoen’s point. November can’t get here soon enough.
March 14th, 2010 at 11:26 am
This is a most important story – another contribution to the continuing saga of dissension within the Democratic party attributable almost entirely to intransigent leadership at both the White House and within Congress which obstreperously refuses to acknowledge public sentiment. Caddell and Schoen are thus important credible sources regarding this intransigence because they represent the results of polling which cannot be accused of carrying water from a Republican background.
March 14th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
I agree with Marc & Bill. I hope the Democrats keep ignoring the likes of Caddell and Schoen (except for the damage they can do between now and November). I have not looked forward to an election this much since 1980.
March 14th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
I am wondering out loud who do these people in Congress and the WH serve?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1257944/NICE-rejects-drugs-allowed-Europe-extended-20-000-cancer-patients-lives.html
March 15th, 2010 at 12:42 am
Have we all forgotten that this bill was written in secret by staffers from Reid’s office and the White House? We haven’t begun to understand what’s in it. Much of it is left to bureaucrats to hash out “regulations” at their whim.
The media’s complicity sickens me. Those &*()_(*& in the mid-stream media are sticking it to America every bit as much as the &*(()&*( Congress is. Down with them all!!!
March 15th, 2010 at 11:48 am
It’s sad that more repetitions of GOP talking points that have very little basis in the reality of the process are all those who wanted to rebut me could come up with. I wasn’t expecting my fairly straightforward and fact-based claims to spark so much (mostly) aimless and uninformed backlash.
The “polls” aren’t “right” or “wrong”; they’re applicable in specific situations. Most polls do show that a majority of the public abstractly opposes the “Obama health care bill”; when you tell people what’s in it, however, the public overwhelmingly supports it. So you choose to look at your polls which indicate what you’d like to believe–also the polls that conveniently omit the details–and run with it, because it has results you like. That’s great! You all win!
If you ask people you purposefully keep ignorant questions about what you’ve chosen not to tell them, you can get whatever answers you please and the data will be equally spectral and useless in a serious, substantive debate.
March 15th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
I know for a fact (with my own eyes)
BOTH these men work for FOX NEWS..
So identifying them as random ‘democrats’ is more than a little insincere..
they are however transnational corporatist Neolibs, like republican mainstream Neocons,
who are focused (above) specifically on criticising the ”public option”, which is not in any jeopardy of being in the actual Democrat bill-
the ‘public option’ is the nightmare of the Neocons/Neolibs as it dries up the PAC/slush money that goes to mainstream repubs/democrats/RNC/DNC..
The actual Obama bill is fully written BY the Health Insurance industry lobbyists..which is the next best thing to doing nothing to both the industry and their elected, bribed, shills.
So this really amounts to=
two FOX NEWS reliable, garden-variety neoconservatives who are putting out a last minute screed decrying the PUBLIC OPTION, in hopes of shutting down any last minute reconcilliation moves that the lobbyists wont have time to counter..
these guys are NOT shouting ”end the Obama lobbyist-written bill”-
they ARE shouting -
”dont get any smart ideas, at the last second, about slipping in a public option that our transnational corporate patrons who pay us will lose the largess they pay to us”…
they are garden variety neo-lib payed media shills, and the actaul story is as detailed above, not as the story is reported.