FireDogLake founder/blogger Jane Hamsher, who led a fairly lonely liberal campaign against the Democrats’ compromised (public option-less) health care bill, claims vindication now that the bill’s not becoming popular. Hamsher took a lot of heat for buying SurveyUSA polls that tested the least popular aspects of the bill, and she says Democrats should have listened:
The DCCC was very good at getting not-so-savvy poll analysts to tryand discredit the SurveyUSA polling. (Those same pollsters, ironically,didn’t see anything weird in the Research 2000 polls they were quoting authoritatively at the time, which many now find suspect — though Jerome Armstrong spotted it ). Somehow Democratic members of Congress engaged in magical thinking andbelieved Rahm’s BS about the popularity of the health care billincreasing if it passed.
Well, I don’t remember talking to the DCCC about this, but I remember not being savvy! I noted back in January that
in swing districts and that liberals were annoyed with what they saw as messaging for the other team. She was right and they were wrong. I’d just quibble with her characterization of the “pass HCR and it gets popular” theory as “Rahm’s BS.” It
, too!
