Big Health Bill Still in Play As Polls Shed Light on Massachusetts Vote

Democrats are not rushing back into action on health reform, and that's probably wise -- because their initial reactions to the week's events might be over-reactions. Post-election polls trickling out of Massachusetts suggest that Republican Scott Brown's impressive Senate victory was not a wholesale rejection of President Obama, his policies, or his health care plan.

Already, the Obama administration is walking back hints that it is looking at slicing, dicing, and miniaturizing the comprehensive reform bills passed by the House and Senate. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs strenuously denied Thursday that those bills were dead. Asked if Obama still believes he can get a health bill similar to the ones the two chambers are working to reconcile, Gibbs twice responded, "He does."

Gibbs said Obama is working on terrorism, financial regulation, the economy, and other issues while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid figure out how to proceed. "The president believes it's the right thing to do to let the dust settle and give those on Capitol Hill some time to search for the best path forward," he said.

With Brown about to take his seat, Democrats no longer have the 60 votes needed to cut off Republican filibusters. The simplest route to sending Obama a bill would be for the House to pass the Senate version that was painstakingly tailored to get those 60 votes. But Pelosi said the Senate bill does not have enough support in the House at this point to pass.

"Unease would be a gentle word in terms of the attitude of my colleagues toward certain provisions of the Senate bill," she said. The two she mentioned are a special Medicaid deal for Nebraska and a "Cadillac" excise tax on expensive health insurance plans. House members appear leery of a plan to fix those problems as part of a budget bill that only requires 51 votes in the Senate. However, Pelosi said that "nothing is discarded, everything is on the table."

National polls show health reform in general is unpopular, but majorities support most major elements of the House and Senate bills. Democratic jitters could ease as the party absorbs new findings about what happened in Massachusetts and why.

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, on Thursday published a Washington Times piece headlined "Just the Beginning." He said "the American people spoke clearly in 2009 and now they have spoken again, even more loudly, in the Bay State." Yet the picture emerging from Massachusetts is decidedly mixed.

So far there are Republican, Democratic and independent telephone polls of Massachusetts residents who voted Tuesday. In the GOP poll, 38 percent said they voted in opposition to Obama's policies and the direction he is taking the country. Another 32 percent said they were voting in support of his policies and 27 percent said his policies were not a factor in their vote. The majority, in other words, were not trying to tell Obama to change course.

Obama's job approval rating ranged from 52 percent in the Democratic poll by Hart Research Associates, to 55 percent in the survey by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. Fabrizio also polled on congressional Republicans. The same electorate that voted in Brown gave the congressional GOP an approval rating of 29 percent. Twice as many disapproved. Nothing to brag about there.

All three polls confirm that health care mobilizes voters on both sides. About four in 10 Brown voters told the Fabrizio pollsters that their most important reason for choosing Brown was his opposition to the president's health care plan. That was, the pollsters said, "the top reason for voting for him by a wide margin."

The independent Rasmussen poll found that, as I wrote Wednesday, Democrat Martha Coakley captured a majority of voters who named health care as their top issue. The Hart poll for the AFL-CIO found a similar pattern. Brown lost 50 percent to 46 percent among voters who said health care was one of their two top voting issues. Two-thirds of Coakley voters cited health care as a top issue, but only 55 percent of Brown voters did so.

Bottom line in the AFL-CIO poll: Brown's position on health reform was a wash. Of the 82 percent of voters who were aware that he opposed it, the pollsters said, 41 percent said it made them more likely to support him and 39 percent said it made them less likely.

So where does that leave Obama and Congress? Cogitating, vote-counting, poll-watching and studying parliamentary procedure.