Even in quiet August, Obama and team under pressure to win the day on health care

Health care fight means no sleepy August for Obama

WASHINGTON — For Barack Obama, these are the dogged days of summer.

In a month when politics often takes a breather — George W. Bush spent his whole first August as president on vacation — Obama doesn’t have time to spare. Washington has fallen silent, but each day, the president and his team are trying to sway a skeptical public and skittish lawmakers about overhauling health care.

And so on a weekend trip that featured visits to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon, Obama touted his message with town hall events in Montana and Colorado. When Obama and his family take a weeklong beach vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., he will be regularly calling lawmakers for political updates.

A nation in beach mode? Obama is clamoring for people to go knocking on doors about health care.

As he put it Friday in Montana: “Because we’re getting close, the fight is getting fierce.”

Meanwhile, the broader West Wing operation is engaged on multiple fronts.

Obama advisers host chats on Facebook and work the Sunday news shows. The White House blasts out health care updates on Twitter. Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod sent out a chain e-mail to counter “lies and distortions” about emerging plans. The White House set up a Web site to challenge claims about Democratic plans. Obama’s outside political organization put together thousands of pro-health care reform events for people to attend throughout August.

And Obama continues to choose his spots with the mainstream media — a prime-time news conference here, a magazine cover story there.

The White House will make sure its side is covered “from now until whenever this is voted on,” Axelrod told The Associated Press.

White House aides caution about overstatement; the next few weeks are vital, they say, but not make-or-break.

Still, time is short.

Polling shows the public is divided over the health care plans, with many people open to persuasion one way or the other. The next few weeks will be a period of competing town hall gatherings and television ads before Congress comes back to take up the matter after Labor Day.

Meanwhile, Obama’s job approval remains north of 50 percent, but sliding.

A Gallup poll from Aug. 6 to 9 found that more people disapprove of his handling of health care policy than support it. Polling also shows people are paying attention to news coverage of the town hall debates, which makes it all the more important for Obama to stay active in the fray.

Karlyn Bowman, who analyzes public opinion for the American Enterprise Institute, said health care is not a stand-alone issue.

The public view has shifted toward a state of “cumulative sticker shock,” she said. People are weary of money spent on bailouts and the economic stimulus, and worried about the deficit with unusual intensity. Part of Obama’s tough sell is persuading the public that the legislation can be paid for without adding debt.

“He needs to regain the upper hand in public opinion,” Bowman said. “He clearly doesn’t have it right now, and that’s a dangerous position to be in.”

It helps explains why Obama, in the typical doldrums of mid-August, held three town hall meetings in five days, from New England to Big Sky country.

He remains the best White House messenger.

“The best thing the president can do to get health insurance reform passed is to have a substantive debate and discussion with the American people,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director. “Doing that, building a consensus, helps get it through Congress.”

To the degree the dynamic feels like now or never, that is by Obama’s choice.

He has promised to sign a law this year and warned this chance may not come again anytime soon. Plus, as he told the nation in prime-time, it is his job to get a deal done. The goal is to expand health insurance for those who don’t have it, improve it for those who do, and rein in the booming long-term costs of it all.

It’s the kind of signature issue that affects the daily lives of Americans and can shape the direction of a presidency.

“When you’re president with big majorities in the House and Senate, if you cannot deliver on your top domestic priority, you’re in big trouble,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Should his health care push fail, West said, “It will be harder to hold the moderate Democrats, conservatives will become even more vocal. It will just weaken the president politically.”

Yet Obama is also further along than many people think.

Four of five committees in Congress have taken action on bills. The House expects to vote on its health care bill in September. Negotiators for the pivotal Senate Finance Committee hope to have a bipartisan deal in place by Sept. 15. If that fails, Democrats may try to get a bill through on their own.

Complicating the matter is that, for now, Obama has no single piece of legislation to neatly defend. He told Time magazine that trying to describe the importance of health care reform in simple, clear terms has become nothing less than “the most difficult test for me so far in public life.”

And so the work goes on.

The vacations are shorter than they might be otherwise. But yes, Axelrod said, people in the West Wing are taking them.

“It is important to get away from all of this,” he said. “We’ve been running flat out for six months, and some of us have been doing that for two years before. Eventually, you hit a wall.”