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Tonight, if a recent Pew Research Center poll is to be believed, a massive television audience will tune in to watch President Barack Obama deliver his big health care speech to a joint session of Congress. Obama likely believes he can entice many of those viewers to embrace his version of reform; the press will likely judge the speechâs success by how much it boosts approval for Obama personally, and for reform in generalâin Slate, Timothy Noah entertainingly aggregates the coverage calling this a âmake or breakâ moment. And itâs not just the mainstream media that will use the speech as a measuring stick. Nate Silver, the wunderkind behind FiveThirtyEight.com, has called tonightâs speech âThe Biggest Moment of His Presidency.â
But thereâs good reason to be skeptical that the speech, whatever its strengths or weaknesses, will have much effect in moving public opinionâbecause, as weâve written before, the evidence that presidential speeches can ever move public opinion is surprisingly scarce. Yesterday, the political scientist John Sides made this point in an excellent post at The Monkey Cage. Sides quotes another political scientist, George Edwards, who found, in a study with a twenty-year sample:
âŚstatistically significant changes in approval rarely follow a televised presidential address. Typically, the presidentâs ratings hardly move at all. Most changes are well within the margin of errorâand many of them show a loss of approval.
Sides also provides some good analysis showing that Bill Clintonâs health care speech in September 1993âsometimes cited as an exception to that ruleâwasnât much of an exception after all. In fact, from mid-1993 to early 1994, Clintonâs approval rating was on a long-term incline. Depending on which polls you look at, the immediate aftermath of that speech may have been one of the few times his support didnât rise.
Gary Langer of ABC News, meanwhile, accepts the premise that Clintonâs speech moved his ratings, but notes that the effect ebbed so quickly as to be more of a blip than anything else. And both Sides and Langer point out why a speech is unlikely to be a game-changer: even with a wide audience, most viewers will be politically attuned, high-information types who have already made up their minds.
Even if Clintonâs speech wasnât an outlier, thereâs at least some reason to think Obamaâs might be. According to that same Pew Poll, 93 percent of respondents said health care reform was âimportant,â and 73 percent said it affected them personally. At the same time, 67 percent of people said the debate was âhard to understand.â If you were trying to create a profile of an issue on which peopleâs minds were open to change, this is more or less what youâd come up withâan audience thatâs motivated to find out more information. Still, itâs better to stick with the rule than to assume that youâve hit on the exception, so observers would be wise to keep expectations in check.
Although Obama has likely overestimated his own persuasive powers, he may have stumbled upon some fortuitous timing nevertheless. As several observers have pointed out in recent days, the outlook for the Democratsâ health care reform push is as sunny as itâs been in some time, for reasons that donât seem to have much to do with the presidentâs public appeals. Max Baucus, whose slow-paced approach to negotiations helped hold up reform before the August recess, is now talking about the need for speed. Olympia Snowe, one of the three Republicans in Baucusâs âGang of Six,â seems to be genuinely looking for a deal. Ben Nelson, probably the most conservative Democrat in Congress, is making noises about accepting some form of the âpublic optionâ liberals have been demanding.
These are the people who can make reform happen; at the moment, it looks as though they may be inclined to do so (though not, most likely, in the form thatâs most appealing to Obamaâs liberal base). Over the last few months, the president has taken a lot of griefânot all of it fairâfor not finding some way to make them do his bidding. If he goes out and gives a great speech tonight, he may end upânot for all the right reasonsâwith the credit.
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