Word: healthfulness
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Barack Obama's top pollster, Joel Benenson, talks fast. "Like a New Yorker, because I am," he says. The night before we spoke, he slept four hours, and after more than a year of watching the numbers slide around his big client's signature initiative, health care reform, one can forgive him for betraying a bit of frustration. "It's never enough to just say people are unhappy," he explains. "You've got to understand why they are unhappy...
...Since August, he's had to deal with "death panels," the "cornhusker kickback" and daily proclamations of a "government takeover" of health care. He has watched Obama's approval rating fall from the high 60s to the high 40s, while opposition to Democratic health care reforms have inched above 50% in many polls. Recently, he's even had Republican leaders declare that Democratic hopes for the November elections will collapse if health care reform becomes law. "Do you really think the Republicans are out there trying to save Democrats from themselves?" he asks. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...best in the business, Hillary Clinton's pollster Mark Penn, challenging a candidate of "experience" with a candidate of "change." His team toppled conventional wisdom. Now he tells wavering Democrats in Congress to take their own leap of faith: Look past the numbers that show widespread dismay at the health care debate and a nation deeply divided over the Democratic bill. Believe that health care reform is a 2010 win for Democrats...
...While Republicans are trying to focus on process, Democrats are striving mightily to steer the ship back toward substance and sympathy for those suffering under the current health care system. Last week, during a press conference on insurance-company abuses, Democrats introduced 11-year-old Marcelas Owens, whose 27-year-old mother died of pulmonary hypertension after she lost her job and health insurance. Days later, Obama began a health care speech with the story of an Ohio woman who lost her insurance coverage and is in the hospital with leukemia. Pelosi is in the midst of a week...
...short term, the GOP tactic to focus attention on process may be working, at least among the Washington press corps. In a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs fielded more than 20 questions and follow-ups related to the process of passing health care reform. But is the public actually bothered by the convoluted process Democrats may use to pass reform? An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday and conducted on March 10 showed that just 35% of Americans oppose reconciliation, while 26% supported it and 37% said they didn't know enough about...