Excellent article. Pinpointed for certain comments made in my earlier post. But-cha gotta visit the news link and read the whole thing. 
Quote from the article:
“The irony is he didn’t even run on health care,” says one Democratic pollster. “In truth, it wasn’t a large part of the general election campaign.”
So enter my comment: why did this become an issue then and one with immediate urgency. Hillary…. care to comment?
The Sweep: What went wrong for Democrats
Editor’s note: In “The Sweep,” CNN dives deep into issues that are making news and explores why they’re in the headlines.
Obama was elected as the corrective to the Bush years. Yet when you’re the winner, the temptation is always there to see yourself as something more than just an alternative — something larger, like a paradigm-changer or a transformational political figure. And Obama wanted nothing less than a change from conservatism to his own brand of 21st century activism.
Think back to the beginning. There’s an economic crisis, which the public believes Obama inherited. Then there’s his bucket-list of things he wants to get done. He has a choice: Handle the crisis or do the campaign to-do list.
And what does Obama decide? To do both. That is, the economy plus the rest of it — including health care.
“The irony is he didn’t even run on health care,” says one Democratic pollster. “In truth, it wasn’t a large part of the general election campaign.”
Remember, just five months into his presidency — in May 2009 — Obama’s popularity was in the stratosphere, at 62 percent. The Democratic Party was so resurgent, in fact, that Republican Sen. Arlen Specter decided to leave the GOP and join Obama’s team as a way to get re-elected. Not surprisingly, Time magazine was posing the political question du jour: “Are the Republicans going extinct?”
The senator who had joined the Democrats was under attack. Newly minted Tea Party activists — joined by a mutual distrust of government — had found oxygen in every component of the financial bailout and the health care reform debate. And they came to attack Specter — who eventually lost his primary — as the embodiment of all that was wrong with Washington.
So even when Congress debated financial reform, the GOP felt no danger in opposing it. And in the end, Obama got little credit. Why? The populism that fueled the 2008 campaign has been replaced with the anti-government sentiment of 2010. They don’t trust the government to fix anything, even evil Wall Street.
So at the time the president was proposing government solutions to problems, the nation’s view of government was bottoming out. Only 20 percent trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time. Even after Watergate, that number was at 36 percent.
When Dwight Eisenhower was president, trust in government was at 73 percent. Nowadays voters wouldn’t trust the government to walk the dog.
Maybe FDR knew what Obama did not: The system can’t function on overload. Besides, Obama had delivered a promissory note to the American people that he would overcome partisanship. Health care only fueled the toxic atmosphere in Washington.
“Health care seemed like a totally inside-the-beltway deal,” says a Democratic pollster. “That went against his own brand.”
Cogitations 