Ezra Klein observes that stagnated public opinion about Obamacare "speaks to a broader truth about political rhetoric":
The things people in Washington say always have less influence than people in Washington think. It’s true when presidents are talking. It’s true during national campaigns. And it’s even truer for the continuing, bitter war over the health-care law, which everyone but real obsessives has tuned out.
I would wholeheartedly subscribe to Ezra's view were it not for empirical evidence that sometimes the things people in Washington have said have had a much profounder influence than those people in Washington ever dreamed.
Which is to say (as just one example) if the nascent conservative movement from Goldwater to Reagan had chosen to buy Ezra's argument that rhetorical wars are essentially futile, that no doubt would have been a happy choice for the nation, but disastrously self-defeating for the movement. Its origins lay in hoping to be competitive with an American liberalism that had dominated the political landscape from FDR to LBJ; its evolving reality mushroomed into its own, multi-decade electoral dominance.
It organized, it persisted, it repeated itself, it crafted a communication strategy designed to persuade. And it was wildly successful. But first it had to reject the argument that rhetorical wars are "always" disappointingly uninfluential.