Good lord. You know times are tough for The One when his big health-care stinkbomb actually starts smelling better to people the further removed from it he is.

I wonder if the White House already knows this from its own polling or if O’s decision to start calling it the “Affordable Care Act” again was just his way of shedding an increasingly heavy albatross. Who wants to be the one to tell him that the albatross is him?

I shouldn’t be surprised but I am. It stands to reason: Many a low-information voter out there couldn’t tell you the first thing about what ObamaCare does or what the problems with it are. All they know is that there are lots of people in the newspapers and on TV grumbling about it and progressively fewer people defending it. “ObamaCare” is bad, whatever it is. Throw the word “affordable” into the mix, though, and people start to perk up. Some of them doubtless are so ignorant about policy that they don’t know that the ACA is ObamaCare. They’re reacting to keywords here, essentially: “Affordable” good, “ObamaCare” bad. The reason I’m surprised is that I wouldn’t have guessed that O’s personal popularity had fallen so low that mentioning him in tandem with the “Affordable Care Act” actually drops support for it a few points. Until very recently, The One’s favorable rating — i.e. his personal popularity — had remained net positive even during periods when his job approval tanked. The Big Lie seems to have changed that, though. Mention “Obama” now in the context of health care and you see the numbers sink, either because the very ignorant are putting two and two together and realizing that the “Affordable Care Act” signed by Obama is in fact ObamaCare or because they now think so poorly of him personally that they reflexively downgrade any policy for which he’s responsible, whether or not they know the details of it. The latter may well be true — remember, in both the big ABC/WaPo poll a few days ago and the Pew poll I blogged last week, his numbers were in freefall on virtually every issue, not just (or especially) health care.

Just for fun, a reprise from last night’s QOTD via the Washington Free Beacon.