Poll Suggests Virginia Gov Race Not A Referendum On Obama

But that's not what the Villagers say, and they're always right. See, sometimes if you look behind the conventional wisdom like Greg does, the silly inconvenient facts shine thru.

But the internals of the new Washington Post poll in Virginia suggest that Obama may not really be an important factor at all. It finds:

* Seventy percent of likely voters say Obama is “not a factor” in ther choice. Only 15% say opposition to Obama is a factor, while 14%, say support for him is a factor.

* Seventy one percent say it makes “no difference” if the governor is from the same political party as the president. More people say it’s good to have a governor from the same party, 16%-13%.

* Obama’s approval rating in Virginia is 54%, in line with many national polls.

McDonnell is leading in this poll by 11 points, and if he wins, there will be a dull roar of commentary about what this means for Obama and his presidency. Obama has inserted himself into the race, and perhaps he’s more of an influence than these numbers suggest. Still, it’s unclear how you square these numbers with the notion that Obama is a major factor in any way.

Health care ideas losing out to ideology

By GottaLaff

Michael Hiltzik has a few things to say about the wingnutty memes v. the substance of the actual, you know, merits of health care reform. In other words, the real, and vital, message is being drowned out by lies and propaganda.

We already knew that, but he spells it out clearly enough for even the dimmest bulbs to grasp the entire ugly picture:

The big mystery of the Democrats' loss of the commanding heights in the national healthcare debate is how they managed to let ideologies trump ideas.

The difference between these two terms is crucial. Ideas arise from recognizing reality for what it is; ideologies attempt to impose themselves on the real world, whether or not they fit.

In this case, the Republican ideologies of limited government, of the free market as the cherished American way and the answer to most problems, have taken over the discussion.

Meanwhile, the search for ideas to solve a real American crisis is left gasping for life like a gaffed fish.

When President Obama speaks Wednesday to a joint session of Congress on the subject of healthcare reform, his main task must be to retrieve the issue from the clutches of ideology and restore the search for ideas to the forefront. Nothing is as important for the economic recovery and the competitiveness of American business. [...]

Blacks and Hispanics account for nearly half the uninsured, and members of families living at or below the federal poverty line for more than a third. (These figures come from a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.) [...]

Commercial insurers deploy armies of clerks to find excuses for rejecting claims and weed out less-profitable customers. [...]

Those are the facts, and there's nothing that ideology can do to change them.

Nevertheless, it's ideology that has dominated this summer's healthcare discussion, such as it is. Those people shrieking with fury at congressional town halls across the country aren't putting forth ideas; they're responding to a right-wing small-government ideology as though to a hallucination. They're being goaded into speaking out against their own best interests [...]

A common trope is that "obtaining healthcare will be like service from the DMV," as one e-mailer wrote.

These sound like the words of someone who isn't bothering to think through what he's saying. [...] In my experience, the California DMV manages my registration and license renewals with admirable efficiency [...]

By contrast, I've wasted days at a time trying to extract treatment approvals from anonymous bureaucrats at my insurance carrier. [...]

If their hypothetical DMV is emblematic of the inefficiency of government-managed healthcare, what's the proper analogy for the "efficient" private sector? Enron? General Motors? AIG? The health insurance industry itself? [...]

California has had one of the nation’s strictest malpractice tort limits for 34 years. But it still boasts among the highest per capita ratios of uninsured residents in the nation. And don't tell me that's because of our illegal immigrants; UCLA's figures show that if you factor out all uninsured residents lacking green cards (assuming they're all here illegally), California would still rank in the bottom half of all states in this measure.

What's surprising is that the White House and Democratic congressional leaders don't seem to have seen the ideological attack coming. Yet it's a familiar phenomenon. [...]

Ideologies aren't always virulent. Sometimes they can help structure a consistent approach to economic or social conditions -- from either side of the political divide. But not when their purpose is merely to body check rational debate out of the arena. On such occasions, aggressive treatment is necessary. Will Wednesday's operation on Capitol Hill set the patient on the path to recovery?

It's all about profit. Human lives are expendable. And our side needs to communicate clearly, forcefully, and in simple terms exactly what is taking place, and what is needed.

It's the same old story, but this is about our health, and we cannot afford to lose this one.