Tea Party in Washington not that grand

By EZRA KLEIN

Remember when the Iraq war protests stopped the Iraq war?

Yeah. Me, neither. Nor, for that matter, does Fox News, nor Rush Limbaugh, which leaves me a bit confused by their joyous reaction to the Tea Party that took place in Washington recently. Estimates peg it somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people, which makes it an admirable bit of organizing, but not a contender for the protest hall of fame. What it seems, rather, is the progression of a broader societal trend: The advent of online organizing is making it easier to connect large numbers of like-minded people and ask them to attend a rally. It’s done that for politicians like Barack Obama, protesters of all sorts and stripes, and even flash mobs.

More interesting, I’d say, is the poll The Washington Post released last Monday. The country is split on Obama’s handling of health-care reform: 48 percent approve and 48 percent disapprove. When asked about the reform effort itself, 46 percent approve and 48 percent disapprove.

And that’s before the polling gets weird. On the two most contentious questions in the health-care reform debate — the public option and the role of the Republican Party — the American people get downright incoherent.

Let’s start with the public option. A solid 55 percent of the country supports “having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans.” That supports jumps to 76 percent if the option is reserved for those unable to get health insurance now. But for all that, when asked if they would favor health-care reform if the government option was dropped from the package, support jumps to 50 percent. In other words, the America people strongly favor the public option, but prefer health-care reform without it.

Differing opinions

Or take Republicans. Asked whether the Democrats should change health-care reform to attract Republican support, 71 percent support the effort to reach across the aisle. But asked whether Republicans are “making a good faith effort to cooperate with Obama and the Democrats on health care reform,” 62 percent say they’re not. And when asked whether Obama and the Democrats are making a good-faith effort to reach out to the Republicans, 50 percent say they are. To sum up, Americans believe the Democrats should rewrite the bill to attract the support of Republicans, even as they believe Republicans have not been negotiating in good faith, and Democrats have been.

What you saw at the Tea Party was a lot of certainty about health-care reform. “No” polled at 100 percent. The American people, however, evince no such clarity. They’re confused about health-care reform, and particularly about the process. They’d be comforted by some level of consensus in Washington, even though they realize one party desires nothing of the sort. I imagine that it would be hard for a congressman to know exactly what to think of these numbers.

But perhaps the most important poll result for our perplexed legislator came toward the end of the survey. The poll asked whether people would be more or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supported health-care reform. Here too, the crowd was ambivalent. But more than ambivalent, they were uninterested. About 22 percent would be more likely to vote for the congressman. About 23 percent would be less likely. And 54 percent said it would make no difference to them at all.

That, at least, is a majority opinion.

X Klein, former associate editor at the American Prospect, reports on domestic and economic policy for The Washington Post. He blogs at WashingtonPost.com/ezraklein.