The taxes are effective almost immediately. Every other part of the so-called health care reform won’t go into effect until after the 2012 elections.

(/sarcm) I wonder why? (/sarcm)

And you know that if they don’t vote on HCR until next year, BOs numbers are going to be important.

will make the voters remember and care.

Does anyone think that health care reform will not be THE biggest issue in the next election?

in both the NJ and VA elections broke heavily for the Republican candidates, and, I don’t believe that it was just state issues that drove them there. I also remember reading that Independents were running from Obama and the Liberals, I’m sure mainly over fiscal issues. Still, it baffles me that he is still in the 50% approval area. It also baffles me that not more than 53% are against Obamacare. It makes it much more difficult for me to believe that any polls are any where near accurate.

…Obama’s job approval ratings are Bush’s in reverse, or a quasi-mirror-image of Clinton’s.

NBC recently did a poll of Obama’s approval on dealing with certain issues, and none of the issues they listed showed an approval rating above 41% (most were between 36-38%). People are simply divorcing their personal approval of him from their policy approval of him.

Bush tended to, especially in the last couple of years of his administration, have higher approval ratings on most issues than he did for an overall approval rating… people tended to go “I don’t really like him… but I can’t complain about how he’s handling immigration or homeland security”.

With Obama, it’s “I really don’t like his health care policy, his positions on immigration, or his foreign policy waffling… but he seems a nice enough guy.”

Under another topic I wrote yesterday:

“At some point the mushy middling moderates, who voted for MAObama out of liberal guilt, might find the courage to admit their mistake to pollsters.

I suspect he is really below 50% in favorability right now, but that the numbers are inflated because - even anonymously on the telephone - some “white” people do not want to admit they are against his policies.”

Allow me to postulate that as many as 5-10% of the voters will not admit that he is no longer their man, or that he never was. No proof, just a feeling I have from dealing with people in the context of polite discussion of political opinions.

and 47% a couple of times recently as well. Also he recently tied his longest ever streak of double digit negatives on the approval index. ( all according to Rasmussen)

I agree that his approval is kept afloat by Democrats and left leaning Independents - and so long as they stay loyal Democrats they’ll likely stay in at least the “somewhat approve” category. For Obama to go below 40% some of the moderate Democrats and Left Leaning Independents need to move to the right. The relatively low number who say they “strongly approve” suggests there’s a huge demographic ready to hear a compelling case for why they should vote Republican,

Senators have much more independence than House members, and I think Universal Health Care will fail in the Senate simply because it will end about 8-10 Senators careers if Democrats need to get 60 votes.

We only need 1-2 Democrats to defect in order to kill it (and maybe not even that, if Lieberman keeps his word, we won’t need a single Democrat Senator to defect). I also think the Health care and Insurance industries are going to finally get off their duff and kill this, they stand to lose TRILLIONS of dollars.

I think the abortion issue though is really a non-issue. I’m just counting on the final bill to have language in it that restricts funding. They’re not going to let abortion derail this, it’s a painless sacrifice. The liberals that say they won’t for any bill that doesn’t contain abortion funding are bluffing, they’re not going to miss a chance to make “history” over such a trivial issue that they can easily come back to later.