It was a tough August for President Obama, a month in which he lost ground in his campaign to overhaul the nation's health care system.
Raucous town hall meetings and attacks on his proposals led the news. A Kaiser Health Tracking Poll shows that 53 percent of Americans now support a health care revision — down from 61 percent in June.
In Florida, proponents of the president's plan are making a push to regain some of that ground.
Getting Out The Word
Since mid-July, Obama supporters have been at the West Regional Courthouse in Plantation, a Florida suburb west of Fort Lauderdale, most mornings to gather signatures in support of the president's effort.
Nan Vollbracht is one of the volunteers gathering signatures on a recent day. She asks people to have their friends and family express their support for the president's health care agenda — and, most importantly, for a public insurance option — to Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.
During the presidential campaign, Vollbracht says, she was on the phone constantly making calls for Obama. After the election, she took a break — until she saw the loud and relentless opposition to the president's health care overhaul.
"I just knew I had to get out there and show the other side," she says of her decision to volunteer now. "They were monopolizing the whole situation. And I know that a lot of people support health care reform — much more than the people that were at those town hall meetings."
Re-Energizing The Ground Troops
Several miles away, in Dania Beach, Sharon Carroll is leading a group of volunteers on a neighborhood canvass. All worked last year on the Obama campaign. They're now back working with the campaign's successor group, Organizing for America.
Instead of a candidate, though, they're now promoting an issue. And improving the nation's health care system is something Carroll cares deeply about.
She says she began to wonder a few months ago why more work wasn't being done to organize support for the president's health care plan. After winning a historic election, she says, Obama supporters were complacent.
"I don't blame it on the organization; people make the organization," Carroll says, "so it's like, OK, we got to get up and do this again."
Since June, Organizing for America has actively promoted the president's health care overhaul. The group says it has had members at most congressional town halls and has held 12,000 events nationwide since June 6, including a series of health care meetings billed as a listening tour.
The group's volunteers and staff say if their efforts have flown under the radar, it's the fault of the media that pay more attention to bombast than to substance.
'He's Not Listening To His Base'
In Hialeah on Tuesday, Obama supporters made a little bombast of their own. They showed up outside a hospital where Republican senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain and Mel Martinez were holding a town hall — one that was not open to the public. They held signs saying, "Health care can't wait." Other signs had photos of McCain and McConnell, along with the question, "Why don't you want a public option?"
News crews from most of the local TV stations were there — as was Anita Michelson, an 81-year-old retiree who, with her husband, Don, campaigned tirelessly for Obama last year.
If there's a lack of fire among Obama's former campaign volunteers, Michelson says, part of the blame rests with the president.
"We were so enthusiastic and so just full of hope," Michelson says. "And now we're disillusioned — not only with the public option, it's also with the war in Afghanistan. It's just, he's not listening to his base."
Staff and volunteers with Organizing for America are optimistic that they can regain the ground they lost on health care last month.
One of the group's leaders has this reminder: A legislative battle, he says, is a marathon, not a sprint.
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