Can't get the message across? Try yelling a bit louder

I love polls, and I'm glad I love them, because if I hated them I wouldn't read them, and I just love 'em. (Thank you, Clarence Darrow). The latest poll to emerge, however -- the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey -- isn't all that lovable, since it tends to confirm that once again we're lapsing into a wizened polarization; that the unifying optimism and confidence of November 2008 are largely gone.

President Obama's job approval rating? A seemingly stabilized 51 percent, with a narrow plurality expressing doubt "that Obama has the right goals ... for the country" and only four out of ten Americans confident that "he has the right policies to improve the economy" (although, and this is just part of every observer's enduring frustration with public opinion polls, "the number saying they’re satisfied about the state of the economy has jumped 20 points since July").

But on the matter of health-care reform, surely after Obama's major, televised speech to Congress, the wild enthusiasm of his pro-reform rallies and his carpet-bombing of primetime media, surely there's been some significant uptick in general support. Right?

Not right. The ranks of those who believe that Obama's proposed health-care reforms are a "good idea" have been swelled, since August, by a whopping three points. This is within the poll's margin of error, but in sort-of statistical fact there are more who believe the needed reforms are a "bad idea."

Virtually identical percentages approve or disapprove of Obama's overall handling of health-care reform (45 and 46, respectively), but a more detectable gap appears when it comes to plain old fear: "48 percent say they’re more concerned that reform will go too far and make the system worse, compared with 44 percent who are more concerned that reform won’t do enough to cut costs and lower the [number of the] uninsured."

As for the level of public support for the severely wounded, crippled and hobbling-along public option, that remains anybody's guess. In July, again according to an NBC/WSJ poll, support/opposition split 46/44, in August it flipped to 43/47, and today, depending on how one asks the question, either a modest percentage or a vast majority supports it -- both of which almost laughably surfaced in this latest NBC/WSJ poll.

Such broad bafflement and confusion and contradictions tell us more than at first we might think: The public, by and large, possesses barely a clue as to what "public option" even means.

Actually, this shouldn't surprise. After all, for week after unrelenting week MSNBC's Ed Schultz, for instance, bellowed and pounded his electronically gleaming table about a public option being the only promise of shutting down the exclusionary scourge of preexisting conditions, while media whackjobs on the right uniformly pronounced a public option as the brutal end of Christendom and the ushering in of absolute Stalinism.

The one thing I would say in hearty defense of Mr. Schultz is what Walter Matthau said of Andy Griffith's ruthless Southern-demagogue character in the rivetingly classic 1957 film, "A Face in the Crowd": "He's got the courage of his ignorance." As for all those right-wing media propagandists, too numerous to mention by name, there is, simply, no excuse. They are, quite literally, inexcusable.

The larger point is this: Here the ideological edges and excessively partisan pols and hysterical commentariat have for months been waging bloody warfare over the sure benefits or coming devastation of an accompanying public plan, while the expansive Middle has sat and said, Huh? What precise manner of byzantine policy are they screaming about?

The result is a profoundly uninformed divide or disinterest, which, as you know -- you must, since you're taking the time to read stuff like this -- cracks this nation like an eggshell right down the middle on most every major issue, even the supreme no-brainers, such as single-payer, or, at the very least, a public option.

What's a progressive pol like Barack Obama, sitting there with his 51 percent job approval rating, supposed to do? Give another speech? No, that wouldn't work. Too many are watching Tom DeLay on "Dancing with the Stars," whose partner, I read somewhere yesterday, didn't even know who he was until he elbowed his way onto her stage. Go ahead, I dare you. Go ahead and ask someone like that to define "public option"; I can guarantee that if they supply any answer at all, it'll be whatever little piece they last caught on "The Ed Show" or from Glenn Beck.

So what is the answer? You got me. As a starter, though, I would recommend that liberals stop hustling liberalism as an ideology and start selling it as, merely, what works -- also known non-ideologically as the ideology of pragmatism. Because it does work -- an empirically verifiable truism from the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt right through the postwar era and on up to Ronald Reagan's murder of practical solutions.

Remember, Americans have traditionally fancied themselves as pragmatists, which is how Reagan, essentially, so successfully bamboozled the electorate: He sold the unworkable ideology of pseudoconservatism as a utile, functional program of governance.

Happily, most progressive pieties happen to coincide with pragmatic solutions; but, unhappily, too many progressives are too busy screaming the pieties rather than emphasizing their inherent pragmatism.

Obama has labored to reverse (to progress against) this self-defeating course, but, seemingly, with little luck, and largely because he's received so little help from his loud, ideological allies. The latters' pieties only turn off the vast Middle, who merely want to be told what works -- and tend not to listen when all they hear is voluble outrage.

Calm resolve isn't weakness. It's strength. And it could help to move the Middle, if only the left knew how.