I’ll just quote at length, but go read the whole thing.
Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn’t go far enough?
It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan — or about 12 of the overall sample — did so from the left; they thought the plan didn’t go far enough
Here’s the ugly part…
With that said, I also think the White House’s positioning on this the public option has been questionable. There’s a middle ground between a world in which the White House would have insisted that the inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable part of health care reform, and their actual positioning, which has been transparently indifferent toward it. In other words, run the bluff — and make the left happy — and then if you have to give up on the bluff at some point to get a bill passed, do some play-acting and look really unhappy about it. Give a big speech, say your hand was forced by the necessity to get such an important bill passed and your desire to reach common ground, blah, blah, blah. Some on the left, certainly, would look upon you cynically if you did this — but probably fewer than if you hadn’t seemed to care about the public option in the first place (i.e. what has happened in the the status quo). Meanwhile, you might have picked up a few points with independents for your apparent willingness to compromise.
So there you have it, sports fans. The sausage being made and the screwing, yet again, of the DFH and all they stand for. Sure glad I voted for Mr. Change and Hope.