Do Americans Dislike Obamacare More Than Obama Likes Golf?
During President Obama’s second term, about the only thing more common than seeing him out on the golf course has been seeing polls highlighting the striking unpopularity of his signature legislation. Obama has golfed a reported 79 times so far in his second term (compared to a reported 24 times for President George W. Bush in both of his terms combined). But even Obama’s inordinate determination to hit the links hasn’t remotely been able to keep pace with the publication of polls indicating Americans’ opposition to Obamacare. According to Real Clear Politics, in Obama’s second term alone, 140 polls have found Obamacare to be unpopular. The number finding it to be popular? Zero.
On average, these 140 polls have shown that just 40 percent of Americans favor Obamacare, while 52 percent oppose it. So, for Obamacare, a double-digit deficit is the norm. (Of the 140 polls, 102 have shown double-digit deficits.) The half-dozen polls taken since July 4 of this year have shown Obamacare faring even a bit worse, as they have shown an average tally of 41 percent in favor of it and 55 percent opposed.
Moreover, Real Clear Politics understandably doesn’t even list results from the notoriously left-leaning Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. Yet even Kaiser has found Obamacare to be unpopular in all 16 of its polls taken during Obama’s second term. And Kaiser’s most recent poll, from July, found Obamacare to be less popular than at any prior point in Obama’s second term — with only 37 percent favoring it and 53 percent opposed. So adding Kaiser’s polling to the polling listed by RCP yields a second-term tally of 156 polls showing opposition to Obamacare and not a single poll showing support for it.
When it comes to Obamacare, Americans clearly want a mulligan. And they deserve one, since they never wanted Obamacare to be teed up in the first place.
A well-conceived conservative alternative — one that repeals all of Obamacare and finally fixes what the government had broken even before Obamacare was passed — would lower health costs, secure liberty, and make it possible for any American who wants to buy health insurance to do so. It’s time for the American people to be given a clear choice between playing such an alternative and hacking on through the deep rough with Obamacare. The people’s verdict will be clear, and those who advance such an alternative will end up signing the winning scorecard.
© 2014 Weekly Standard LLC. Reprinted with permission.