Liberals, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, have figured out a great way to brush off the results of the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicating that only 43 percent of Americans support the “public option” feature in the Obama health-care plan: Blame the pollsters.
Their argument is that the pollsters framed the question wrong. Instead of asking people whether they liked the idea of a “public option” (that’s code for government-run health insurance), they should have asked whether they favored the “choice” of a public option
Then, the liberal theory goes, 47 percent of respondents to the poll wouldn’t have rejected the idea of a public plan, as they did. “By dropping what the president proposes and what the public strongly supports–giving people a choice– from their list of questions, the NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters misrepresent reform and raise questions about their own agenda,” complained Peter Hirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
Well, hey, doesn’t “option” mean “choice”? My dictionary says it does. It defines “option” as “the exercise of a power of choice.” So giving someone the “choice” of an “option” is grammatically redundant. But liberals prefer to think of ordinary Americans as too stupid to know what words mean.