The Health Care Popularity Canard

22Mar10

The first of a couple posts tonight

First, a semi-custom poll from yours truly via Pollster (I’m temporarily giving up on how to embed that). It’s just about a 5 point gap, which is near the margin of error. I removed all clearly biased polls on both sides. The only controversial removal I made was Rasmussen, but this has traditionally trended more GOP than not, and also separates its responses into 4 categories, including “somewhat agree and somewhat disagree.” I think this was a poor choice on Rasmussen’s part because it’s clear that I, a liberal, am going to “somewhat disagree” with aspects of the bill.

But more importantly, if the government made decisions based on popular approval, we’d be out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I talked about this a bit in my post on blogging and self-efficacy, but I do sometimes struggle to find unique things to say about politics. But this point seems to not even come up as a response to the GOP talking point. Why isn’t there any pushback? Even on MSNBC, the general pundit line seems to be “people will grow to like this bill.” I don’t think that’s a justification for Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, in fact I don’t remember this argument being used then.

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Tags: gop, health care, health care polling, health care popularity, health care reform, Obama