The Presidents decision to address a joint session of Congress over health care reform is little more than damage control.   The Democratic majority is reeling from a huge public outcry that snowballed into an avalanche of public opposition.  Quite remarkably, instead of listening to their constituents at town halls, several Democratic Congressmen have drawn lines in the sand against their own electorate in an ‘I know better’ approach to public service.  It almost goes without saying, but this will backfire enormously when Democrats come up for re-election in 2010.

Enter the Sand Man.   The challenge before Obama is to elevate health care out of the quagmire and into bipartisan legislation. However, with huge divisions over basic ideology on both sides of the political spectrum, it isn’t all together certain that he will, or if he even stands a chance of accomplishing anything meaningful.

President Obama should understand what is at stake along with the volatility of the entire situation.  He should hunker down with majority and minority leaders to hammer out differences and serve as a uniter.  On a more fundamental level, if Obama can’t unite both parties on health care reform, how will he ever hope to unite Israel and the Palestinian Authority over far more difficult issues? Even though he should be serving as Uniter-in-Chief, he is preventing himself from doing so because he hasn’t identified anything beyond simple rhetoric that he strongly believes in.   Complicating things even further is that he seems to occupy all corners of the same ring, it’s almost as if Obama is wrestling Obama in a White House version of Political SmackDown.   This is a strange seldom seen form of political omnipresence in which one man is confined wrestling over his own set of ideas and issues.     

When Obama goes on national television telling the American people that he is willing to abandon the public option, only to be skewered by house Democrats who refuse to give it up, the President not only loses credibility, but house Democrats come off as the ones who are running the country. One would at least think Obama would have checked with Pelosi first before offering to sacrifice her holy cow. 

According to George Will, this will be Obama’s 112th speech or interview on health care, as if 111 weren’t enough.   But there is good reason for it.   Obama is his own worst enemy in that he doesn’t fully believe in, or stand behind, his own ideas of health care reform.   Look at his track record.  First he announces that any reform must include a public option, and when support flounders in the Senate, he changes his mind.   Next he goes on record stating reform cannot occur incrementally, and then throws out the very center piece of the Democrat plan by suggesting that can come later.   And when he loses support among his own house Democrats he somehow finds merit in blaming house Republicans.   There isn’t anything clear in his actions.  His signals are like radio waves from outer space… all static with no signs of intelligence.  

Predicting any speech Obama gives isn’t hard to do.  When the polls are down, Obama always draws on public appeal to regain support.   He always speaks to the poll based majority. His public appeal has faded so he views this as an opportunity to regain public support.  For Obama, it isn’t about the substance of health care reform, or even loyalty to any particular measure.  In fact it isn’t about anything that he truly believes in.  

What Obama cares about most are his ego and his popularity.  He knows most Americans want reform and he doesn’t care how they get it, which explains why he hasn’t articulated any plan of his own outside of broad generalities and talking points.   

His speech won’t endorse house radicals like Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters who are unwilling to abandon the public option, and who are eager to push through a partisan Bill without any GOP support.   Even though he might agree with Pelosi and Waters he can’t come off as feeding into a partisan agenda.   Instead, he will appeal for broader bipartisanship as a means of pandering to a much larger majority, based on polls showing most Americans want health care reform, including Republicans.   In a very real sense polling data will be his speechwriter.  

If we didn’t already know which polling data Obama would use, whether from non-partisan or partisan sources, we could only guess on a probable outcome.    But since we already know the White House has circulated a rather upbeat polling memo we can predict the Obama talking points.   And this is where the train departs the tracks.  By relying solely on media partisan polling he incurs huge liability of misreading the public.   If he ignores non-partisan polling institutions he will totally misread public sentiment.    

The differences between media and institutional polling are ideological.  Media polling deals in generalities based on internal biases aimed at producing a predetermined outcome, so the questions tend to be vague or general in order to yield a more favorable result.      Institutional polling deals more in specifics based on external conditions with no judgement made as to outcome, and the questions tend to have more substance.

This forms the basis of what Obama faces.  Will he address the usual media driven generalities, or will he be more substantiative on the issues surrounding health care by sticking with specifics.   Here in lies the answer.      

The White House memo shows a majority supporting the President on health care, while Rasmussen shows a majority opposing Congress’ plan.   Both could very well be within their margins of error, but note the key difference.  The Rasmussen poll cites a specific question about a plan that most people have either read or discussed in the form of 1000 plus pages written by Democrats in the Congress.   Compare that with the White House memo which doesn’t offer anything tangible beyond simple generalized opinion polling.   Obama thought he could sell a plan based on generalities and is left with the scary notion of providing specifics.  New territory for a man who was elected on the buzz words ‘hope and change’.  

The truth is most Americans do want reform, they just don’t want the type of reform being pushed through by Congress.    

So what will Obama do?  He will talk tougher on generalities and avoid specifics beyond all previous talking points.   In many ways speech 112 will be a condensed version of speeches 1 through 111, with added toughness.   

What his speech will say;

-  ’Health Care Reform Must Not Wait and Will Not Wait’

- He will marginalize Town Hall protesters by paying them patronizing lip service about how important it was (yaddy yaddy ya ya) and will tell Congress there has been enough debate and the time for action is now.

-  He will give Congress another ‘deadline’ before the end of this year.

-  He will direct Congress to come up with a plan that doesn’t add to the national debt.  

-  He will modify the public option to include trigger points, with emphasis on driving down costs.

-  He will demonize the health care insurance industry with one or two sad-sack victims sitting next to Michelle, and we will hear about how private care screwed these people over.

- He will quote ‘47 million uninsured’ (or use Howard Deans 50+ million)

- He will call for bipartisanship and will set a future meeting with house minority / majority leaders.  

- In a bid to appear tough on behalf of the American people, and citing the urgent need for reform, he will threaten to use ‘reconciliation’ but only as a last resort.

Anything less is to be expected. Anything more will risk further division in an already severely fractured debate. The end result of Obama’s address will see higher public support on Thursday based mostly on charisma points. This will be enough to move the debate forward so that eventually something will make it through both houses of Congress. Even if that means Pelosi sacrifices her holy cow at the feet of Obama, and even if the Senate forces itself into reconciliation. In the eyes of Obama those are acceptable losses provided that something makes it to his desk for purposes of declaring victory, no matter how hollow a victory it might very well be.