Can Obama win back support for health care reform?

Most Americans are confused about the health care reform proposals before Congress. That’s good news.

I had feared that August — featuring some town hall protesters who seemed to believe President Obama was the spawn of the devil — revealed a nation returned to the Dark Ages, willing to believe in witches, evil spells and the perversity of black cats. Anybody who sincerely believed that the president wanted to kill off the frail elderly might believe anything. (After all, the president was devoted to his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died, at the age of 86, just hours before his election as president.)

If Americans are merely confused about health care reform, as a new CBS poll shows, that’s a relief. Confusion can usually be cleared up with a simple yet persuasive public relations campaign. Indeed, last month, NBC’s Chuck Todd noted:”After being read a statement that includes actual details of the Obama health care plan, a majority — 53 percent — say they are in favor of it.”

But this isn’t the usual campaign for change. This is an all-out battle against entrenched monied interests, including many physicians, most health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry; health care spending accounts for about 17.6 percent of gross domestic product. Obama and his allies can also count among their opponents a Republican Party determined to stop health care reform at all costs, not because of any principled ideological concerns but because GOP leaders see it as a way to ruin his first term.

So it’s not at all clear whether President Obama has a decent shot at dissipating the distortions, exaggerations and outright lies that his critics have thrown into the debate, like stink bombs, in an effort to kill genuine reform. The president’s poll numbers are sinking like lead.

And he has now even lost the support of some members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had initially backed his plans for reform as a moral imperative. Ultra-conservative bishops have been misled by the mendacity about taxpayer-funded abortions, euthanasia and “rationing.” “No health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform,” Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, wrote in a recent pastoral letter, according to The New York Times.

Given a 50-year-history of failed efforts to fund universal access to health care, Obama should have been better prepared for the opposition. So why has he done such a poor job? How could he lose support for a proposition which was popular during the campaign and helped him get elected?

Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain,” blames Obama’s aversion to conflict and partisan combat.

“This president and his leadership team believe that leadership is channeling hope, and even touching (voters’) anger and anxiety is off limits. It’s the politics of (Michael) Dukakis,” Westen said, evoking the failed Democratic presidential candidate whose bloodless response to a hypothetical question about his wife as a rape victim came to symbolize a campaign that never connected with voters.

Republicans, Westen noted, have no compunctions about using emotion, which always sways voters more effectively than reason. Nor do they have any aversion to engaging in the most egregious demagoguery, if it helps them accomplish their goals.

Obama and his Democratic allies may finally have understood what they are up against. There cannot be any bipartisan approach to health care reform without an opposition party willing to negotiate with a shred of intellectual honesty. The GOP isn’t showing any signs of intellectual honesty, so there’s no reason to waste time reaching for a bipartisanship solution.

And there won’t be broad support for an overhaul of the health care system unless Obama can manage a simple message that cuts through the distortions of his opponents. That might require him to put aside his “no drama” persona and go for the jugular. But he can’t wait much longer.