The Hiller Instinct: Obama's healthcare end game

It's true we don't elect politicians to base their votes on polls, but we also don't elect them to ignore us.

"So that's our proposal. This is where we ended up," President Obama said. 

Where the president and his party have actually ended up is on one side of a great divide he once promised to bridge.

Go back to Barack Obama’s debut on the national scene at the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004. Here’s what he said in the speech that helped make him president:

“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” said Obama. 

But now Obama is pushing a plan that will keep the parties divided.

And America is pushing back.

Put all the polls together and fifty percent of Americans oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care plan, while forty-one percent support it.

Oh yes, he did add a few Republican ideas to his new proposal, but two of them will make health care more expensive, and cost is what opponents of the plan say they’re most concerned about.

“I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right,” Obama said in his speech. 

For the Democrats to benefit politically from their health care reform, it must become more popular after it passes.

Many Democrats in Washington are betting their jobs it will.

I’m not convinced that’s a smart bet.

I’m Andy Hiller, and that’s my instinct.

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