The latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll on health care offers more sobering news for Obama:

A FOX News poll released Thursday shows that by a 15 percentage-point margin the public opposes the plans under consideration (34 percent favor and 49 percent oppose). In late July the difference in views was a bit narrower, although even at that time more were opposed by an 11-point spread.

For the most part, the public doesn’t see the upside of reform. Views are mixed on how the plans will affect the country, with a slightly higher number saying “most Americans” will be worse off (36 percent) under the plans as think they will be better off (34 percent). Some 20 percent say the reforms would not make a difference.

[. . .]

Americans say the noisy protesters at town hall meetings are expressing authentic outrage. Some 52 percent think it is real outrage by concerned citizens—significantly more than the 29 percent who think the protesters are fake mobs planned by lobbyists and other opposition groups. More than a third of Democrats (34 percent), most Republicans (74 percent) and nearly half of independents (49 percent) think the meetings are an expression of real anger.

There really isn’t any good news in there for Obama. The effort to shift the debate from “ObamaCare is a scary government takeover of healthcare” to “Aren’t all the protestors goons?” has flopped spectacularly. The voters still think ObamaCare is a scary government takeover of health care, and they now believe the protesters have every right to tell their representatives just that. And yes, it might be that calling protesters everything from racists to “evil-mongers” to insurance-company pawns has made Americans even more wary of a heavy-handed government health-care plan. Americans know when the government is trying to bully them.

Rational and self-reflective people in the White House, when presented with such an avalanche of data from this and other polls, might take the rest of the month off, think about what went wrong, and start over both on substance and rhetoric.

But this administration, more than any in recent memory, is convinced it knows best and that opponents are either plants from the right-wing spin machine or so contemptible as not to be taken seriously. It was that hubris that got them in this fix—the conviction that they could jam through a government-run health-care plan on flimsy assertions and with no time for real scrutiny. And it is that same hubris that may prevent them from recalibrating their policy and reworking their sales pitch.