A central challenge for President Barack Obama is rebranding health care reform into something shiny, new and salable, in the short window before lawmakers return from recess in September. The political atmosphere is fluid. Raucous town halls, troubling new federal deficit projections and a poll showing Obama with a new, low public approval rating may have substantially changed the game. “I don’t know what Obama’s got left in his bag of tricks that he hasn’t already used before,” said Michael F. Cannon, a health policy expert at the Cato Institute. “Nothing seems to be going their way.” The same old pitch hasn’t been working. During August, the administration lost significant ground in the reform battle, losing control of the message repeatedly on its signature policy initiative. Some reform advocates are calling on the White House to clarify the issue with a point-by-point plan for remaking health care, saying Obama has been too vague and created confusion about his own priorities. But having left it to Congress to fashion reform with a few guiding principles from Obama, the administration is now locked into waiting out the resolution of five different health care bills. Others have called for scrapping the current reform drafts and starting over with fresh ideas. A likelier scenario would be a significantly scaled back reform policy, or a series of incremental bills passed under the general umbrella of reform. The president returns to the White House on Sunday from a week at Martha’s Vineyard. Deputy press secretary Bill Burton said administration officials didn’t believe public desire for health care reform has waned. “I would say that the temperature right now is that the American people want and need health care reform, and the president is committed to getting that by the end of the year,” Burton said. As for Obama, Burton said, “He’s going to do a lot of the things he’s done before … he’s going to come back as rip-roaring as he was before.” Even so, a few things are different. The recent town hall flare-ups may send lawmakers back to work more skittish about embracing Obama’s proposed public option for health care and other controversial provisions. Obama also may feel the political effects of new government forecasts predicting the federal deficits will add $9 trillion to the national debt over the next decade — a development likely to have a cooling effect on lawmakers’ willingness to pass costly new programs, despite Obama’s pledge to make reform deficit-neutral. A Gallup Poll last week suggested the limits of Obama’s political capital, showing the president with a 50 percent job approval rating, down from a 69 percent high in January. Gallup said Obama hit 50 percent faster than many of his predecessors. “Obama really needs to get out there and as clearly and simply as possible explain to people how reform is going to help them,” said Democratic strategist Keir Murray. “He needs to reassure people the sky isn’t going to fall on their heads.”
