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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for the 31st of July, Friday.

It's a special bright and early coffee-laden Gab Fest today with Emily Bazelon in New Haven and special guest Michael Newman here in Washington, D.C., with me in the sweatbox that we're in.

It's particularly hot in here today, and that is, you may see that manifest itself later in the show,

but where we're going to talk about health care, the president's efforts to get some kind of

reform passed and his declining approval rating on that issue on others.

Then we're going to talk about the beer at the White House, the Coalition of the Swilling, met finally after much discussion at the White House. That's good, John. Did you quite know yourself? I stole that from Steve Chigaris of CBS News. That's my favorite one so far. It is mine, too. And you'd think there would be a whole host of ones we liked, but that's it. That's the one I like so far.

Yeah. So anyway, and then we're going to touch lightly on Sonia's side, Sotomayor, who made it out of the Judiciary Committee and is likely to be confirmed as an Associate Justice next week in the Senate before they go home on vacation. So I'm going to ask my first question to Michael Newman, which is Michael. Not good polls for the president.

What do you think? How big of a deal do you think this is for Barack Obama, the 44th president in the United States? I don't think we know yet because I don't think we know what's going to happen.

I think the president has said he had that long interview in time where he sort of talked about

how this is the hardest thing he's ever done politically anyway and how he has having trouble explaining exactly why he thinks this change needs to happen.

And I guess I found that interview both surprising and also evidence itself of how difficult this was because I found it

confusing. He was trying to talk about things and I didn't really understand what he's trying to

say. Just to give a sense of where the polls are this week, we had a Pew poll, New York Times,

CBS poll, a Wall Street Journal poll, and I think a Gallup poll also in which the president's

approval ratings are in the low 50s, which is sort of back to sort of human being level from the stratospheric height.

Politics has reasserted itself. But on the economy and health care in particular, people disapprove more than they approve of the way he's handled the issue.

And independence in particular, a group of the White House watches very closely the numbers are like at the low 40s in terms

of approval of the way he's handled health care so what's happened is the more he's talked

about it keying on what Michael just said about finding him confusing the more he's talked about it

the worse the situation has gotten for him on the question of health care Emily Emily, what happened? I thought he was a great communicator. Partly, I think this is about his failure to convey a really simple, straightforward message. But I think it's also just that Congress is stuck. And when Congress gets stuck, people get frustrated. Even people who say they want gridlock. They don't actually want to watch for weeks while bills can't get out of committee.

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