On the one year anniversary of ObamaCare being signed into law, nearly 6 out of every 10 Americans oppose ObamaCare, according to a new CNN poll.
Yet in reporting the development, the network's website spun the development by noting the polling is about where it stood last year and that the latest poll could be bad news for Republicans.
From a March 23 post at CNN.com's Political Ticker blog (emphasis mine):
One year after President Barack Obama signed the health care reform bill into law, a new national poll indicates that attitudes toward the plan have not budged.
According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday, on the one year anniversary of the signing of the law, a majority continue to oppose the measure, but some of the opposition is from Americans who think the law is not liberal enough.
Thirty-seven percent of Americans support the measure, with 59 percent opposed. That's basically unchanged from last March, when 39 percent supported the law and 59 percent opposed the measure.
"It's worth remembering that opposition to the bill came from both the left and the right last year, and that has not changed either," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "In 2010, about a quarter of the health care bill's opponents disliked the bill because it was not liberal enough - the same as today. That works out to 13 percent of all Americans who oppose the bill because it did not go far enough. Forty-three percent oppose it because it was too liberal."
[...]
There are two ways to look at the poll's overall numbers. One is that 59 percent oppose the law. The second is that if you add the 13 percent who oppose the law because it's not liberal enough to the 37 percent that support the law, you come up with 50 percent of the American people who disagree with the Republican leadership on the issue.
Of course, between last year and now there's been an intervening midterm election that reduced the ranks of Democrats in the Senate and netted House Republicans 63 new seats, securing a sizable majority.
What's more, the 2012 election cycle is foreboding for Democrats, pitting many liberal Democratic incumbents from solidly red states up for reelection in a year when conservative voters will be champing at the bit to vote against Obama.
Those factors certainly give an edge to conservatives.
What's more, if Obama's liberal base is bummed because they think Obama is not liberal enough, the White House may not be able to count on the enthusiasm and heavy turnout the president enjoyed in 2008, making reelection anything but a slam dunk.
