A recent poll of likely voters in Iowa comprises something of a mixed bag. If the election were held today, sitting Democratic Iowa Governor Chet Culver would very likely go down in defeat to Republican challenger Terry Branstad, favored by 60% of those polled, and doesn’t do much better against Republicans Bob Vander Plaats or Chris Rant with such a very large number of Undecideds. A majority of voters disapproves of the job that Culver has done in office while a narrow plurality approves President Obama’s, not precisely a ringing endorsement and a tribute to the president’s personal popularity if not his accomplishments.
However, the polling questions on healthcare reform are equally interesting albeit distressing. A solid majority, 57%, opposes the healthcare reform making its way through the Congress but an even larger majority, 61%, favors something on the order of Medicare for all. Free beer continues to be popular. I wonder if the results would have been different if the cost side of that equation were included in the poll.
Those results on healthcare reform are consistent with national results from back in October.
My tentative conclusion from this is that, although most people are convinced that the cost of healthcare is a serious problem, relatively few have any realistic view of what needs to be done to deal with it.
I think what you’re pointing to is the weakness of pure democracy and what should be the strength of representative democracy. We elect people whose job it is to parse the details of complex policies and programs.
Unfortunately that’s not how it works anymore. We have a democracy of vested interests, lobbyists and a necessarily under-informed populace forever being misled by vested interests and politicians whose sole core belief involves re-election.
That’s certainly part of the equation, Michael. I think another part is the division of the country into clients and professional, even hereditary, patrons.
I think that enough people have been affected by health care issues to know that something needs to be done. We have one political party making an attempt to provide reform and one committed to opposing it. It is just too easy to demagogue anything that might actually work. We are at an impasse until the two parties can work together, we obtain majority rule or there is a catastrophe of some sorts. Given our current circumstances, I do not find it surprising that the public would turn to a program that appears to work and which both parties vigorously defend.
Steve