Voters scared of Obama’s rushed ‘experiments’
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
July 21, 2009
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| Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele blasted President Barack Obama's plans for the economy and health care in a speech at the National Press Club on Monday. (Seth Wenig/AP file) |
With one word Monday, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele helped the GOP get back in the fight over health care and the entire Obama agenda. The word was “experiment.”
“Candidate Obama promised change,” Steele said in a speech at the National Press Club. “President Obama is conducting an experiment.” Steele went on to accuse Barack Obama of carrying out dangerous experiments with the nation’s health care, with the economy, with taxpayers’ dollars.
“Experiment” didn’t come from nowhere. “The term bubbled up from a set of focus groups we did with swing voters, independents, soft Republicans and soft Democrats,” says one strategist involved in an extensive RNC research effort nationwide and in key states like Virginia, Colorado and Florida. “It’s something that a vast majority of voters believe is true, that Obama is running what amounts to an experiment with our future.”
The RNC researchers came away convinced that Americans are scared. Certainly voters expected Obama to do things. But they are frightened by the sheer scope of the president’s proposals, the fiscal dangers they present and, perhaps most of all, the astonishing speed with which the administration is trying to enact such fundamental and far-reaching changes.
“When Americans voted for change, it was for a change from the uncertainty and economic unpredictability at the end of the Bush years,” says Alex Castellanos, the Republican message master who helped shape the RNC campaign. “But the president is giving them economic unpredictability on steroids. There is the clear sense out there that he is moving so fast on so many fronts that his health care plan cannot be well thought out.”
You can see those feelings in the latest Washington Post poll in which just 49 percent of those surveyed approve of Obama’s handling of health care. The numbers were eagerly received by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill. “This is a signature issue for him; it’s something he campaigned on, and it’s something that was inevitable in January,” says one key GOP Senate aide. “And now he has less than 50 percent approval on it and independents are running away.”
The more support peels away, the harder Obama pushes. Up until the weekend, he was demanding the House and Senate pass health care bills before the Aug. 7 recess. It was a schedule with no basis in reality, but only now — after Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the moderates asking Obama to slow down, reminded him that it took Lyndon Johnson a year and a half to pass Medicare — has Obama backed away just a little.
But the public understands that he wants to rush, rush, rush, and voters told the RNC researchers that they were tired of the pressure. “Repeatedly,” the Republican strategist says, “we’d hear, ‘Wait a second. We had to do the stimulus in the dead of night, we had to do cap and trade without anybody reading the bill, we had to move quickly on a multitrillion-dollar budget without any serious public debate, and now we’ve got to get health care done in two weeks?’ ”
Republicans believe there’s a real chance Obama will make his own situation worse by pushing too hard. People have heard this sort of thing before. Anyone who’s bought a car, a TV or an insurance policy knows the feeling when a salesman amps up the pressure to close the deal. You need to buy this today, sign the papers right now, don’t wait another minute. When that happens, the smart customer backs off a little: Why is this guy trying to rush me into this? Behind all the focus groups and the message, that’s the simple version of what is happening now, with Obama in the role of the salesman and the American people as the smart customer.
For a long time, it looked as if Republicans were flattened and hopeless while Obama moved from victory to victory. But now, the sense of energy is palpable. The GOP critique of Obama is sharper, its discipline better, its fundraising up — all just seven months after the party got its clock cleaned in both the presidential and congressional elections.
The result of the Obama experiment might not be nationalized health care, but a re-energized Republican Party.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on Examiner Politics.com.
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