Obviously part of the problem is that they are being deliberately lied to. But there are probably relatively few people out there swallowing and regurgitating all the lies.

Why? Simple: relatively few people pay much attention to politics, and most people have a very low level of familiarity with the specifics of any particular issue. According to a recent Kaiser poll, only 27% of Americans are following the health care reform debate closely. There are strong believers on both sides of the issue, but the key, as it always is in American politics, is the mushy, ill-informed middle. Those are the people who are reparably confused. But it’s important to understand that Americans are confused about the very basics, about even the terminology that they are supposed to use when chatting at the water cooler. Most importantly, they don’t know what the public plan is, and the phrase itself is open to Rorschach-style projections. The famously salesman-like Obama failed to frame his product in the most basic way: giving it a good name.

In 2005, you could be for or against “the privatization of Social Security.” In 1995, you could be for or against “welfare reform.” In 1965, you could be for or against “guaranteed health insurance for the elderly” and the “Voting Rights Act.”

What are you supposed to be for in 2009′s health care debate? What simple, easy-to-understand, attractive phrase did Democrats pick to encapsulate their plan? The “public plan” was it, but “public plan” is a terrible political phrase. “Public” conveys the idea of something that everyone uses, provided by the government: public transportation, public parks, public roads and bridges and beaches. How easy to believe that the public plan entails “government-run health care,” or a “government takeover”! Only recently have the Democrats started saying “public option,” but “public plan” has already stuck.

But wait, you say, the public plan is actually popular! A recent NY Times poll found 66% favoring “a government administered health insurance plan.” First of all, I’d love to see what the same sample of people thought about the “public plan.” I’m confident we would have seen a different, and lower, level of support, which reflects the fact that Republicans and Republican-leaners know they’re supposed to hate the public plan, and also the fact that it’s such an easy thing to believe the worst about.

Second, support for the public plan is extremely shallow. The same poll found 69% of Americans feeling concerned that the quality of their health care would drop. That’s a powerful concern. The same Kaiser poll from before showed that support for the public plan plummeted when it was suggested that it would give government an unfair advantage over insurance companies and be the first step towards single-payer. Granted, support rose when people were told it would provide choice and bring down costs by increasing competition. But Obama didn’t want (or shouldn’t have wanted) competing narratives about a public plan. You don’t want the mushy middle to be prepared to believe anything they’re told, not on an issue as sensitive as health care. You don’t want to count on their believing your side of the story.

Third, remember the 27% statistic from before. A successful political endeavor has a tagline that the other 73% can get behind, because the 73 percenters are the air that the 27 percenters breathe: they are friends, family members, colleagues, and interview subjects for journalists. What they think is at least as important as what the well-informed think.

Ironically, I believe that the way to solve this problem would have been to use an even vaguer phrase than “public plan,” which is now coming into vogue, from the start. It always should have been “health insurance reform.” Get “health care” out of it. Nobody feels any love for Aetna and Blue Cross, but people like their “health care”: they like their doctor, they like their local hospital, they like their kids’ pediatrician, and they like their pills. Threaten those things with reform (read: change) and you’re bound to scare people. Throw in language about a “public plan” and you’re bound to confuse people. But “health insurance reform” isn’t the type of thing you can easily believe bad things about. It suggests change, which people overwhelmingly desire, and probably to a much firmer degree than they support any particular kind of change. And it focuses the attention on the insurance companies and on the consumer-friendly regulations Obama is pushing. Obama and his PR team have realized their mistake, and their new eight-point list of reforms is supposed to rectify it. It might work, but it would have saved us a lot of pain if he had thought through the sales job in the beginnning.

I have to agree with Maureen Dowd, who writes today that “the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed.” (An even more cynical observer might say that the President’s accommodationist, business-friendly side prevailed.) But the root problem isn’t that Obama’s failing to “squash” his nutty opponents, as Dowd says. He is trying and trying and trying to do that, but he will keep failing because the terms of the debate have been set, perhaps irreparably, in his opponents’ favor.