Public opinion, a public option, and public obscurity

The other day, while half-listening to some cable news show, my ears perked up at hearing the NY Times' John Harwood confess to a lifelong torment of ambivalence: wondering whether the American electorate is reasonably astute, or hopelessly befuddled.

I, too, go back and forth on this question, as you likely do, as well. After all, the vast body politic that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president on no less than four occasions also, a generation later, twice elected Richard M. Nixon, and yet another generation down -- and I do mean down -- the road, did the same (sort of) for George W. Bush.

Compress the eras and geography and it's like Alabama declaring by acclamation Michael Dukakis as its governor for life, or Vermont recalling Bernie Sanders and replacing him with John Ensign.

One wonders, in short, if all that many are actually paying attention; or do public opinion and public persuasions merely take on insubstantial lives of their own, largely insulated from the tangible material that swirls around them.

On the contemporary and rather massive issue of health-care reform, it does indeed seem, according to a recent Politico piece -- "Health care polls leave pols dizzy" -- that, by and large, the detached frame of mind unpropitiously holds.

The Politico put it delicately: "Legislators hoping to learn what their constituents think about the issue ... face a dizzying deluge of hard-to-reconcile data, some of which suggests that voters are more than a little confused." Translation: see opening paragraph, section Harwood, subsection "hopelessly befuddled."

The paper's gentle wiping of popular drool occurred twice in that passage; the one is obvious, yet it was preceded by the tender journalistic mercy of, "hard-to-reconcile data." Simpler translation: downright irreconcilable.

For example, 55 percent of Americans, says one poll, are firmly behind a public option. Oh, you slackers, says another; it's actually a walloping 79 percent. OK, either way, there's majority support, right? Yes, but get this: in the second poll -- the one purportedly revealing a groundswell of popular support on behalf of a public option -- only a dispiriting minority (37 percent) were able to show they even understood what "public option" meant.

So who knows? Perhaps support would hover at 80 percent or so. Or maybe 55. Or maybe 40? There's no way to know, really, since after months of this topic's prominent coverage, the vast majority of those polled can't even define it.

If you're of a statistical-averaging bent, there's always the "ABC News summary of the results of eight polls from late July through mid-August." Unfortunately, its results only straddle a conclusion: it "found that support for a public option ranged from 43 percent to 66 percent." Hence for politicians, it's dealer's choice: the public does, and doesn't, support a public option.

But here's the thing. Those national numbers mean little, anyway -- no more, that is, than national numbers generally mean in a presidential-election contest. Jay Rockefeller, let's say, might well be looking at a consistent 66-percent public-option support level in West Virginia, thus he'll fight for it, guns blazing. But if Kent Conrad's North Dakota numbers come in consistently at, say, 57 percent opposed, then he'll fight just as vigorously against it. Neither much cares what national polls say; the nation doesn't reelect them.

Then of course there's the money -- always the money -- and from whom it comes.

Besides, according to yesterday's NY Times, we're already looking at a fait accompli. When the two Senate committees of health and finance go to merge their respective bills, "the combined bill would not include a proposal for a government-run insurance plan, or public option, despite the clamoring of liberals who support it, senior Democratic Senate aides said."

And at that point, everyone will be able to at least spell, if not define, "public option": d.e.a.d.

On the other hand -- and here I start sounding like a public opinion poll -- as in physics, there are, in politics, no absolutes. A public-option-amended Senate bill might be nigh impossible, and a public-option-included conference bill just as virtually insurmountable -- reconciliation or not -- but it's never technically over till the fat lady sings. (She is, however, warming up.)

But back to the original topic: What to make of the American electorate on all this? It seemed, last November, reasonably astute, yet almost instantly regressed to the befuddled stage. Some blame the intense disinformation campaigns launched by the right, some blame the utter lack of a coherent counter-campaign by the left, and some write the whole thing off as merely emblematic of a half-engaged, largely inattentive modern democracy -- whose final products, consequently, are always designed by the fully engaged, keenly attentive special interests.

I suspect I've asked a leading question.