Voters seeing through Obama’s poll-tested lines about health care

Posted by Bill Dupray on Aug 25 2009 Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

In a deliciously ironic piece, Joanthan Weisman at the Wall Street Journal talks about how the Democrats spent literally years poll-testing and trying to find just the right words and phrases to sell nationalized health care. In other words, they wanted to know how to fool enough people into thinking it was not nationalized health care. The problem is that you can call something a warm, creamy treat, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a pile of crap.

In the rhetorical battle over health care, the forces backing President Barack Obama’s overhaul have spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters — an effort that doesn’t at the moment appear to be working.

When Mr. Obama told grass-roots organizers last week that the mandatory purchase of health insurance would “be affordable, based on a sliding scale,” the phrasing precisely mirrored language that had been poll-tested and put before batteries of focus groups by Democratic consultants over the past few years.

The words had been carefully chosen in an effort to take away the rhetorical targets of health-overhaul foes and replace them with terminology that would bring ordinary Americans on board.But under steady attack from opponents using more-emotional language, some of the president’s allies are rethinking the linguistic strategy.

The irony is that the president’s sole claim to fame is his smooth, silver tongue. The difficulty with that particular attribute is that when nobody is buying your schtick, there is no Plan B. The Liberals master plan also forgot to take into account one big factor: American voters are thinking human beings.

But Republican aides with their own lexicon argue that in the end, voters will see little difference between a “public option” and a “government plan.”

The alliance and its pollsters planned responses to the charge of “government-run health care” and “socialized medicine,” and thought through how to neutralize fear that expanding health-insurance coverage would help illegal immigrants and what to say to small businesses.

But Dr. Crittenden said no one anticipated the charges that the Obama program would include “death panels” or advocate euthanasia. Perhaps more important, said Lake Research head Celinda Lake, no one foresaw the intensity of protests at town-hall meetings.

Turns out Americans learned long ago that you can’t polish a turd. It won’t take a shine.

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