Analysis: Republicans have simple message: No

While Democrats were shaping and delivering health care change, Republicans waged a skilled and largely successful campaign to demonize the whole business.

They still are, still on message. That's not difficult when the central message is simple: No.

Answering simplicity with complexity is a political loser. That's the challenge for President Barack Obama and the Democrats as they to persuade Americans that a bill the size of a telephone book is in the national interest and their own.

"When I sign this bill, all of the overheated rhetoric over reform will finally confront the reality of reform," Obama said as he did so on Tuesday.

No way. As the campaign for Congress intensifies, the harsh words of the health care debate will grow harsher still.

Politically, health care will be a tough sell. Republicans in Congress, the tea party types who shouted their angry denunciations outside the Capitol, conservative opponents in general, all will be trying to punish Democrats who voted for the overhaul aimed at insuring 32 million Americans who don't have coverage now. And the opposition drumbeat appears to have succeeded in tipping opinion against the overhaul.

Public opinion surveys have indicated more Americans oppose than favor the overhaul, although a USA Today/Gallup survey said 49 percent thought its passage was a good thing, 40 percent not. Most other surveys have shown the public about evenly divided, if skeptical. Republicans insist that Americans are overwhelmingly against the measure.

"You may win this vote today through arm-twisting tricks and backroom deals, but let's see who's still here after the American people speak loud and clear in November," Rep. Connie Mack of Florida said in House debate.

"This is a bad bill that grows even more unpopular every single day," Rep. David Dreier of California said just before it passed. "...The process has been so tainted that we cannot simply gloss over it."

Far from it. Opponents made the process a major talking point, an attack Democrats invited with deals that traded votes for legislative favors. In everyday conversation, away from Washington, the topic wasn't what the measure does; it was about the special deals doled out for crucial votes.

While major provisions of the new law won't take effect before 2014, its first features will be effective by late September, in the midst of the congressional election campaign. That should be good timing for Democrats, because those provisions are among the most popular.

Among them: Young people will be able to continue coverage under their parents' policies until they are 26; there no longer can be lifetime limits on coverage; children cannot be denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions; and seniors whose prescription drug spending has hit the gap in Medicare coverage will get $250 rebates.

On itemized provisions like those, polls show broad public support. Indeed, on the broad goal of making sure that all Americans can get the health care they need, one survey showed 86 percent support. There is support, too, for requiring that everyone have at least some health insurance and that all companies provide some coverage to their workers.

So there are openings for Democrats to make a campaign case for the health care law while Republicans try to make it an issue against them and complain about the way it was enacted — by Democrats without a GOP vote in Congress.

"Never before has such a monumental change to our government been carried out without the support of both parties," said Ohio Rep. John Boehner, the Republican leader.

He's right, but it was Republicans who chose to play it that way, and while they claim they were frozen out of the process, they didn't really try to join it.

They showed no signs of interest in working on a compromise. Indeed, when a handful of Republican senators tried, they were rebuffed by their leaders and threatened politically at home by challengers on the right.

Republican leaders opposed Medicare in 1965, but when it passed, it got 65 GOP votes in the House and 13 in the Senate. Social Security got 77 Republican votes in the House and 14 in the Senate when it passed in 1935.

This time, Republicans were unanimous: No. As they told it, the measure was a government takeover, socialism, a step away from freedom toward tyranny, with "death panels" that would pull the plug on Grandma.

"You've been hearing a whole bunch of nonsense," Obama said in one of the last of his 54 speeches seeking passage. In the age of nonstop cable television talk, repeating a claim or a complaint makes it register. Republicans did it well; until the final days before the bill passed, Democrats did not.

So health care may well be a Democratic liability in the off-year elections, always a difficult test for the party in White House power. Then again, Republicans have been known to overreach and foment a backlash, as when they blocked the budget and the government shut down temporarily in 1995 — an unintended favor for President Bill Clinton.

Now they are talking about undoing the health care law just enacted. "We're going to repeal this," said Arizona Sen. John McCain, the nominee who lost to Obama.

They can't, of course. No more than they could in 1936, when Republicans campaigned for the repeal of Social Security. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won every state but two.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Walter R. Mears reported on government and politics for The Associated Press for more than 40 years.