One of the biggest shocks and disappointments for Democrats is that the positive bounce from Obamacare that many Democrats had expected has never come. They’re still waiting after four years:
Democrats have been waiting for ObamaCare to become popular for four years.
And counting.
Congressional leaders and senior White House advisers have been saying since 2010 that public opinion will turn their way sometime soon. Be patient, they have told anxious members of their party again and again.
“I think as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it’s going to become more and more popular,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in March 2010. “So I predict … by November those who voted for healthcare will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”
“I think that [the Affordable Care Act] over time, is going to become more popular,” David Axelrod, then a senior adviser to President Obama, declared on the same show in September of that year. Two months later, Democrats ceded six Senate seats and 63 House seats to Republicans.
ObamaCare helped catapult Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) to the speakership of the House, and demolished dozens of Democratic political careers.
Democrats now face the prospect of a second midterm drubbing in 2014, and the healthcare law is even more unpopular than it was last time around.
According to a Pew survey released last week, 53 percent of the public disapproves of the Affordable Care Act, with only 41 percent saying they approve. Opinions were split almost evenly in the fall of 2010 before the Republican wave election, which Obama called a “shellacking.”
Adding to the nervousness among ObamaCare’s advocates is the fact that enrollment numbers lag significantly behind the administration’s original estimates.
If that doesn’t change, especially among young healthy people less likely to need healthcare, premiums could rise sharply.
There is controversy over whether premiums are really likely to rise as much as some have predicted. And the positives of health care reform are being increasingly noted by journalists and bloggers. But the fact is this: Obamacare has not yet made the shift to where it’s a positive for the Democrats. So Democrats have to adjust themselves to the polling realities which means they’ll either have to continue trying to sell and convince or downplay and focus on a few of the existing positives.
After the 2014 elections — if they go as poorly for the Democrats as some predict — many in the Democratic party may no longer be willing to sing a version of this song:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.