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The Honeymoon Is Not OverObama's challenge: get the public to like his policies as much as it likes him.

By John DickersonPosted Thursday, June 18, 2009, at 7:17 PM ET

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Since the start of his presidency, Obama and his aides have been trying to address people's fears about the deficit. He's held numerous events highlighting his deficit-reduction plans, including one last week promoting stronger fiscal safeguards. He's also made deficit reduction the central theme of his health care reform pitch. People don't appear to have heard. In the CBS/New York Times poll, 60 percent said they didn't think the president has a plan for addressing the deficit. It's not that they don't like his plan—they don't even think he has one.

The president has also tried to convince people that his stimulus bill has been working. The message hasn't gotten through, either. His claim that 150,000 jobs have been saved or created has been panned by the press, factcheck.org, and analysts, and the public doesn't seem to be buying it, either. In the CBS poll, 63 percent say Obama's policies have either had no impact on the economy or made it worse.

In terms of voters (as opposed to issues), the biggest general problem for Obama in the numbers comes among the independents. After the 2008 election, they are now at their highest level in the electorate in 70 years, and they are moving away from him. In the NBC/WSJ survey, 46 percent of independents approve of Obama's handling of his job, which is down from 60 percent in April. In the CBS/New York Times poll, 65 percent thought Obama lacked a plan for the deficit.

What do these findings suggest for the president's ability to sell his health care reform package? It's a big and complicated issue with a lot of entry points for demagoguery. (Rationing! Socialized medicine! Budget buster!) If Republicans frame the debate around its cost, they might be able to exploit people's hard-to-change views about the deficit. That's why administration officials insist that the health care plan will not increase the deficit and why members of Congress working on the plan have delayed its release until they can find a way to make the program deficit-neutral.

The president has the wind at his back. Sixty-one percent want some kind of change in health care, and only 35 percent don't, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll. A recent Pew poll shows 75 percent want to change the system to cover everyone. Some elements of reform are even more popular, like a public option, which 65 percent favor. Other proposals are not popular. Sixty-five percent oppose taxing employer health benefits, an idea under serious consideration because it helps offset new spending.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the Kaiser poll is that persuasion matters. Of the 28 percent who oppose requiring employers to pay for health insurance, three-quarters are open to changing their minds if they are convinced it would be fairer. Tell the nearly 70 percent who favor such a mandate that it'll cause job losses, and 65 percent of them will flip. This seems to echo a similar volatility in the findings of former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, who writes in the New Republic that the country is divided evenly on whether the greater risk is an unchanged status quo or government reforms that "create new problems."

On health care, then—as on so many other issues—the lines of debate are familiar: The opposition will claim that the president's plan will create new problems. The president will try to convince the country that the status quo is unacceptable. The winner will be the side that the public decides not to kick in the shins.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Barack Obama by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Republicans and Democrats forget that during the Reagan administration, while his personal approval ratings were good the polls about his actual policies (especially domestic ones) were not - usually being below 50%. In spite of that he got elected for a second term. Perhaps the Republicans shouldn't start celebrating about these polls quite yet. At the most they only mean certain proposals will have a harder time getting passed - even with a vast Democratic majority in Washington.

-- businessanalyst
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The problem with polls only five months into a presidency is that they are going to reflect unrealistic expectations. Paul Krugman points out that when Ronald Reagan stimulated the economy with large deficits in 1981, it took 16 months before the effect was seen in unemployment statistics. President Obama's stimulus came into effect four months ago. Given the magnitude of the shock to the economy under the Bush administration, I would be very surprised to see a full recovery in Obama's first term.

-- pwoxby
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I guess I "like" him better than I like "W" and I sleep better knowing he's president but I realize now that I voted for a blank screen who allowed many, if not most of us, to project onto it/him whatever we wanted. Many of us who "saw" a progressive, or at least a progressive alternative to eight more years of the Clintons, now realize that what we really saw was a reflection of our own hopes, or more likely, desperate need for a clean sweep. We didn't get that, we won't get that and though I don't really wish I'd not voted for him, given the alternative, I won't make the mistake of political transference ever again.

-- Harmiclir
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