GOP chairman Michael Steele, interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s The Situation Room:
BLITZER: The Washington Post/ABC News Poll that’s just come out on the so-called public option, a government-run health insurance company to compete with the private insurance companies, according to this poll, 57% of the American people support the idea of a public option, 40% opposed. I know you are adamantly in that 40%, but it looks like a significant majority feels differently.
STEELE: Well, you know, I appreciate that, I don’t necessarily trust that number. If you look at the question, and what they’re asking, it kind of lends itself to a "yes" for the public option. So, I’ll take that at face value, Wolf, and give the Washington Post its due on that point. What I then look at is the subsequent tabs and the subsequent questions in which a majority of the people - 60 some percent - are saying they don’t want a government-controlled system, they are upset about the taxes, they have real concern about the spending. So when you juxtapose those two together, I think you come to a different place on where the folks are on the public option. Yeah, we like the idea of it, but the reality of it is going to be something very different.
Obviously, Michael Steele isn't making the case for the public option -- he remains firmly opposed to it. But instead of reciting the tired (and false) old trope that the public doesn't want the public option, Steele builds the logical equivalent of a Rube Goldberg device to argue against it.
Steele initially tried to argue that the poll's public option question was biased, but he wisely abandoned this argument. As a reminder, the poll asked:
- Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans?
That's a reasonable way to ask the question, and 57% said they supported such a plan compared with 40% who said they opposed it, a net margin of +17, compared to just +6 in August and +13 in September.
After acknowledging that he accepted those poll numbers "at face value," Steele claimed that a subsequent question in the same poll showed that people "are saying they don’t want a government-controlled system." Steele's claim is untrue, however. The poll asked no such question. The poll did ask whether people thought the health care plan "creates too much government involvement in the nation's health care system," but only 42% said yes, with 56% disagreeing.
So to sum it up:
- Steele admitted that Americans "like the idea of" the public option, but don't like "the reality of it"
- To support his claim that they don't like "the reality of it" Steele invented a poll question that was never asked
- The only poll question remotely similar to the one cited by Steele made the exact opposite point that he claimed
It's worth remembering that the cherry on top of this cake is that the Washington Post/ABC poll shows that the public does not care very much about what Republicans think about health care reform.
Indeed, Americans by 51-37 percent in this latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they'd rather see a plan pass Congress without Republican support, if it includes a public option based on affordability, than with Republican backing but no such element.
Those findings mirror numbers from our poll released earlier this month. Let's hope Harry Reid keeps them in mind as he prepares a bill for the Senate floor.