Over on the homepage, I write this on the topic of public opinion leading up to the passage of the Recovery Act — aka the stimulus — in February of 2009:

. . .everyone agreed that Congress needed to address the problem, but there the consensus stopped. Some thought that market forces and innovation in the private sector would solve the problem without government interference, while others thought that cutting taxes, eliminating regulatory hurdles, and empowering Americans with new economic tools could speed the process along. Many worried that the favored response of the Democratic majority in Congress — heavy-handed government intervention via costly and complex legislation — would only make things worse.

If you were to stretch that basic narrative across the ensuing 15 agonizing months, it would sound an awful lot like the Obamacare saga, wouldn’t it?

And the parallels don’t end there.

In both cases, despite broad public skepticism as the bills reached the floor, the Democrats pushed forward and the White House intensified its messaging efforts, turning President Obama loose on crowd after friendly crowd in an effort to sell Middle America on a near-trillion-dollar fix whose murky specifics were in flux even as it approached a final vote. Sure enough, in both cases public support slowly creeped up as Congress passed the measure (with virtually no Republican support.) And in the days immediately after each became law, support even reached scant majorities or pluralities in some places — with many saying that though the bill was imperfect, it sure beat doing nothing at all.

Liberals, covered in the stink of success, are now enjoying that bump for Obamacare. But, as I outline in the piece, if Obamacare’s post-passage public opinion trajectory is anything like that of the stimulus, they shouldn’t get too comfortable. A year out, the popularity of the stimulus falls somewhere between Tiger Woods and John Edwards. — and for similar reasons. The stimulus is widely-perceived to have been a failure because it didn’t keep its promise to stop and reverse job losses. Instead, 49 of 50 states have lost jobs since its passage.

We’re only a few days out from Obamacare becoming law and already reports are piling in from businesses bracing for tax increases and coverage changes. Wait until it’s been a year.

To their credit, some liberals recognize that the public opinion bump is not really a BFD. Nate Silver is cautious about reading too much into the bump, and TNR’s Jonathan Chait says that though there has been a “Zeitgeist shift” in favor of the Democrats in Washington, there will likely be no lasting effect on the underlying political reality.