dajafi wrote:jerseyhoya wrote:But you need to win the hearts and minds if you want to have any sort of long term window to enact policy.
The Democrats rode into power in 2006 and 2008 because people hated Bush. Then they started passing stuff like health care, and people are like, "Oh $#@!, we didn't want that. We just wanted that Bush guy to leave."
This argument rests on two premises I think are pretty dubious: that people understand what "that" is, and that there's something like uniformity in public opinion of health care and "the Obama agenda" in general. On #1, we know what's popular (new rules limiting insurers' ability to $#@! people over, subsidies for those who can't afford to buy their own coverage) and what isn't (the mandate, and stuff like death panels that isn't actually, y'know, in the law). On #2, my recollection of polling on health care is that the seniors--the folks who already get fully socialized medicine--hate it, while everyone else is neutral to positive.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the opposition to "health care reform," like the stimulus, the continued prosecution of the Afghanistan war, the bank and auto bailouts and every other single thing the administration has done, comes more from the country's general pissiness at the economy and disappointment that Obama didn't magically make it all go away than well-informed, deeply reasoned disagreement with the policies themselves. Particularly since the health law was essentially Romney's policy and TARP began under Bush.
edit: I'm not saying that "the public" necessarily overwhelmingly supports all or even any of these things, or that no Republicans could mount a well-informed and articulate argument against these programs; obviously, many could and have. But I do think that if the administration had been more effective, or luckier, in its initial assessment of and response to the economy they found upon arrival, everything else would look different. Them's the breaks, though.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think about the timing of the collapse? It really came at the worst time for the government to deal with it.
I would be interested to know what parts of the response were started by Bush and what parts were mostly Obama's idea. At the time, it really seemed like the primary response was in place by the time Obama came on the scene in full force. I would have to think a new president's first instinct is to acquiesce to a large degree in a situation where there is a severe crisis and the group in power has all the details and you're trying to find your footing coming into a new job. They say it takes a year or so for a new president to learn the ropes. Obama had to hit the ground running in a big way.
