How many times have we been through this? Pollsters will ask people what they think of President Obama’s X Proposal, and they mostly disapprove. But when asked about the individual provisions of the X Proposal, a whopping majority think they’re grand.

We went through this with the Affordable Care Act, and we’re seeing it again with the jobs plan. What does this tell us?

I think it tells us something very simple. It tells us that most of the people polled have no clue what’s actually in the policy they’re being asked about. They just know they don’t like it, because that’s the vibe they feel sluicing out of their radios and TV sets and computer monitors.

The Noise Machine is well stocked with well-funded pundits — and some angry liberals — who declare over and over again what a failure President Obama is and how disappointed we’re all supposed to be and how he doesn’t know what he’s doing, blah blah blah. So, naturally, when people are asked about the President’s X policy, they dutifully repeat what Everybody Else says, which is that it’s probably a bad idea.

But why then do they approve of the individual parts of the policy? Because probably they had no idea that’s what’s in the bleeping policy. Hearing the individual provisions for the first time from a pollster, they say yeah, sure. Good ideas.

But then all the headlines and sound bites of the story say people don’t like Policy X, which reinforces the impression that Policy X is bad.

Really, people, polls don’t tell us anything about how good or bad a policy is. They are tests of the effectiveness of the Noise Machine. The degree to which the public says what it’s conditioned to say tells us how well the propaganda is working.

So, for once, I think Steve Benen doesn’t quite get it —

This may seem counter-intuitive — if people like the parts, they should like the whole — but it makes a lot of sense. Indeed, we saw the exact same thing during the fight over health care reform when Americans said they didn’t like the Affordable Care Act, but strongly supported all of the ideas in the proposal. The problem is one of political perceptions — the president is struggling, so when folks are asked about his plan, the question becomes a referendum on him. But when asked about specific ideas, it turns out most Americans agree with Obama and his plan. (Likewise, during health care, folks were misled by attack ads and lousy media coverage, and came to think poorly of the proposal, but they actually liked what’s in the plan.)

But I don’t think most Americans understand what’s in the Patient Protection Act to this day, which is why it still polls fairly poorly. Big whopping chunks of the electorate may say they like the individual parts when asked by pollsters, but they still aren’t associating those individual parts with the PPA.

Put another way — if you were to give America a pop quiz on what’s in the PPA or the jobs plan or just about anything else the President has proposed — we’d flunk. Solid F. There aren’t enough of us who understand the proposals to make up for the vast ocean of cluelessness that is the American public.

As I’ve said in the past, I don’t blame the public as much as I blame news media for doing a crappy job covering political issues. Most people don’t have time to spend hours on the Web every day looking up information about things. They need issues explained to them, clearly and succinctly, and nobody is doing that. Or, I should say, the very few who are doing that are being drowned out by the Noise Machine of propaganda, so little actual information reaches most folks.

And it doesn’t help that most of the Left with any kind of megaphone is more or less echoing the Right’s argument — Obama’s a disaster, let’s primary him, yadda yadda. Hey, you don’t have to like him, but if you want to make America a place where progressive ideas are heard, honestly discussed, and even implemented, progressives need to stop whining about Obama and start trying to educate people about how progressive ideas can help them.

I think the biggest reason the President hasn’t been as effective as we wanted is not that he was a secret wingnut all along, but that he is cautious about overreaching what he can sell to Congress and the public. And the political climate is screaming at him to be cautious. You want a more progressive president? Make this a more progressive country.

We progressives may console ourselves that the public really is on our side because people agree with our policy ideas, but that’s not going to mean squat come election time, because the public won’t know anyone is proposing those policy ideas. They’ll just know they are disappointed in President Obama. Everybody says so.

At Balloon Juice, Kay has an update on the Ohio referendum to kill the union-busting law. She thinks that some of the firemen who have joined the effort probably are Republican voters, because they don’t complain about “Republicans” or “Kasich,” just “politicians.”

Too, the fireman spoke with what sounded to me like a real sense of betrayal and that’s another common theme I’m hearing. He said he never imagined that teachers, police officers and firefighters would somehow end up as “the problem” because everyone, at one time or another, has relied on a teacher, a police officer or a firefighter. He said “I didn’t know I was next”. At that point, a UAW member in the crowd shouted “I always know I’m next!” and everyone laughed.

I’d say the one thing American voters had better get through their heads is that they are expendable. The right-wing machine will turn all of us into a “problem” sooner or later. If the Right continues to control Congress, sooner or later they’ll find a way around the 13th Amendment’s ban on indentured servitude.

Elsewhere — Bobo wants the people to know that the government cannot protect them from “their” sins, meaning that government has limited power to cushion them from things like financial crises.

Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t.

Matt Yglesias says,

That something along these lines has become something like the conventional wisdom in Washington is, to me, maddening. Here’s a story about bus drivers in Clark County, Nevada getting laid off as a result of state/local budget woes. Are those soon-to-be-unemployed bus drivers really suffering for their sins? …

…Governments around the world have immense power to protect people from negative consequences. And they’re using that power. Nobody, thank god, is starving to death in the United States of America. But the government has done immensely more to protect creditors, shareholders, and managers of major banks from the negative consequences of their sins than it’s done to protect bus drivers.

Next?

Paul Krugman weighs in on Ron Paul’s “let ‘im die” sympathies.

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.

Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.

The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.

Krugman goes on to argue that the “moralists” of the Right think it is more moral to allow the poor, even poor children, to die, than to subsidize any part of health care with taxpayer dollars. This include poor children, as witnessed by the fight over S-Chip.

Ezra Klein, “Why libertarianism fails in health care.” Ezra points out that a former campaign manager of Ron Paul’s died of pneumonia without health insurance because he had a pre-existing condition and couldn’t get insurance. Ezra also makes the point that many people who receive health care are not in a position to refuse it. For example, if you are hit by a bus you may wake up six months later with a $600,000 hospital bill. I also think someone should ask Paul if he’d let a two-year-old die because his parents don’t have insurance.

Paul Krugman on the squeezed middle class.

More on the Brooklyn special election — “Jewish voters switched to GOP over NY same-sex marriage, Israel.” It wasn’t about President Obama. Everybody stop panicking.

Michael Klare, “America’s Oil Fueled Collapse.”

Another court decision about religious indoctrination in public school classrooms has the Religious Right throwing itself a pity party. I explain on the other blog.

I will defer to Nate Silver’s analysis of the special election in Brooklyn yesterday. See also Steve M., who knows that district a lot better than I do.

Via Big Baby DougJ at Balloon Juice — Dave Weigel comments on yesterday’s rightie hysteria over Paul Krugman’s 9/11 remarks. Noting that Donald Rumfeld was so angry he canceled his NY Times subscription, Weigel said,

On a day when everyone else was flashing back to 9/11/2001, I was flashing back to the days and months later, when criticism of the Bush administration returned, and the practioners of it became, briefly, Emmanuel Goldsteins. Remember Susan Sontag? Remember the Dixie Chicks? Remember the campaign to “revoke the Oscar” from Michael Moore? There hasn’t been much criticism of the substance of Krugman’s remarks; denying that 9/11 and counterterrorism strategy became “wedge issues” is denying a few years of political history. The criticism is of Krugman for expressing it. He brushes the criticism right off.

“I’m not saying anything in that post that I wasn’t saying back in 2002, when people like him were riding high,” says Krugman. “And isn’t Rumsfeld ‘sweep everything up, related and not’ the poster child for 9/11 exploitation?”

If you’ve forgotten the “sweep everything up” reference, there’s a refresher here.

“There hasn’t been much criticism of the substance of Krugman’s remarks …. The criticism is of Krugman for expressing it.” So typical.

The President sent his jobs bill to Congress today.

“The only thing that’s stopping it is politics,” Mr. Obama said from the White House Rose Garden on Monday. “We can’t afford these same political games… Let’s get something done. Let’s put this country back to work.”

Matt Yglesias says House Republicans have decided to obstruct it. In their heads, any win for the President is a loss for them. He quotes the President’s speech:

Today, Obama presented Congress with his jobs legislation. In his remarks, Obama noted, “There are some in Washington who’d rather settle our differences through politics and the elections than try to resolve them now. In fact, Joe [Biden] and I, as we were walking out here, we were looking at one of the Washington newspapers and it was quoting a Republican aide saying, ‘I don’t know why we’d want to cooperate with Obama right now. It’s not good for our politics.’ That was very explicit.”

He’s daring them to obstruct the bill. And obstruct it they will.

Marin Cogan and Jake Sherman write for Politico:

House Republicans may pass bits and pieces of President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, but behind the scenes, some Republicans are becoming worried about giving Obama any victories — even on issues the GOP has supported in the past.

And despite public declarations about finding common ground with Obama, some Republicans are privately grumbling that their leaders are being too accommodating with the president.

“Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?” said one senior House Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss the matter freely. “I just don’t want to co-own the economy by having to tout that we passed a jobs bill that won’t work or at least won’t do enough.”

The trick for Republicans is to look as if they are cooperating with the President, but not so much that they piss off the baggers; and appear to be giving the jobs bill a serious look even though they plan to obstruct it. They also have to go back to the American people and say the real way to grow jobs is to cut taxes and regulations. Because that worked so well when President Bush did it. Oh, wait …

See also: Regulations, taxes aren’t killing small business, owners say

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63214.html#ixzz1Xlo27Dxh

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63214.html#ixzz1XlnrQWv0