I bow to nobody in my love of a good "Dems suck at teh messaging" meme. But of late, I've been reading a lot of variations on the theme of "the White House fumbled its sales job on healthcare reform and that's why an overwhelming majority of Americans hates it (some of the comments here, for example)."
People, the Dems may suck at messaging, but more than anything, they were simply outspent by Republican money men running a classic "muddy the waters" play. A study by media research firm Kantar Media has found that the Tea Party media machine outspent pro-healthcare reform groups 3-1, plunking $250 million down on jibbering ads warning of death panels and the Red Menace that threatens to take granny's Medicare away and make her toil on a collective farm for her heart pills or something.
And of that measly $76 million accorded to the pro-healthcare reform side, three-fifths was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services -- which is to say that most of that was not hard-hitting issue advocacy advertising but rather the sort of earnest, wonkish, mute-button-bait explanation-of-benefits stuff that government agencies put out. Meanwhile, Tea Party Rent-a-Riots were taking over townhalls, rightwing billionaires were blasting spittle-flecked fearmongering all over the airwaves and our nation's news media was, as usual, declining to referee the claims and instead running with the usual "He said/She said" formula.
Which brings us to today, when nearly seven in ten Americans say they want the Supreme Court to strike down all or part of the Affordable Care Act, even if they overwhelmingly like the individual components of the law -- when informed of what's in it, which virtually nobody but us political obsessives has any idea of.
It didn't matter that the right was trading in fantastical whole-cloth lies to smear a center-right, pro-business piece of legislation cooked up in one of their own think tanks. They didn't need to persuade anyone to adopt their point of view, even if they had a coherent one on this issue. They just had to seed some doubt. And with that kind of money, they could afford to seed a lot of doubt.
So while I could go on for hours about Obama's missteps or the gross incompetence, political and philosophical, of Congressional Democrats, I don't blame them for the gross popular misperception of what Obamacare is and does. It is what it is -- the inevitable outcome of an inexhaustible rightwing money spigot guarded by an unabashedly political conservative Supreme Court majority and unhindered by a toothless press afraid to perform its basic function as arbiter of reality.
President Obama and Congressional Dems stuck their necks out for this law, imperfect as it is. They stuck to it and pushed it through well past the point where it was clear that it would be a drag on their near-term political fortunes. And imperfect as it is, it will do a world of good for a lot of people in the here and now if the Supreme Court doesn't dismantle it in the next week. The ACA is, more than anything, why I admire the hell out of this president. We can wring our hands about his shortcomings and we can mourn the sorry state of this, his signature initiative, but all of us who claim to care about the plight of the uninsured and underinsured and the depredations of the insurance industry and other Healthcare Inc. vultures ought to have his back this year.