Pfeiffer On The Challenges, Failures Of Selling Health Care

Health care reform is a difficult, complicated thing to communicate to the American people, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said this morning, and, in hindsight, the White House could have done a better job selling it.

The administration's top communications aide, appearing this morning at a State of the Union panel hosted by The Atlantic and National Journal, said that health care became defined by the drawn-out legislative process by which it was drafted--and not the substance of the reforms.

Here's what Pfeiffer said:

"On health care, this was always going to be a tremendous challenge. It is one of these things that's incredibly popular in theory, and then once the rubber hits the road, the numbers go down. It's the history of attempts to pass health care reform.

"And I think the underlying part of that is something that we can't change, which is there is a decades old skepticism that government can handle something this big and this complex without adversely affecting your daily life, and you can't fix that in theory, no speech changes that, really the only thing you can do is pass it, implement it, and then have people see that the apocalypse doesn't come the next day.

"And our hope is that the criticisms of it have been so far afield from the actual facts that when it's passed, when the president signs it and people realize that death panels aren't coming to your door the next day, that no one's yanking your doctor away, that people will automatically see that it's much different than they have come to believe. That's something, I don't think, there's no bully pulpit solution to in the short term.

The one thing that, I think, is very clear is that from the beginning we allowed, all of us together allowed, the process to overwhelm the substance. It became defined by what is a very long and messy legislative process. It became identified with horse trading and deals and partisan bickering and sort of became emblematic of what's the worst part of Washington.

"We needed to before, and we need to now, and I think last night's speech began this process, to lift up the substance above the process and about the day to day maneuvering."

Asked whether Republicans framed the discussion, Pfeiffer said he didn't think so, but that...

"I do think that the tens of millions of dollars that the insurance industry spent across the country on ads impacted public opinion on it. I don't think there's any question about that. I think it wasn't so much Republicans or opponents who framed it, it was the process.

"And could we have done a better job? Absolutely, I don't question that for one second, you know, you always look back on these things and think of one more thing you can do."