In response to my “Triangulate! Or Something!” post from this morning, a reader-friend points me to this Lowry post last month. The gist of both posts is that Obama does better when he’s out of the public eye. If memory serves, this was the case with John Kerry when he was running for president in 2004. When he talked about what he wanted to do, his numbers went down. When he went windsurfing — or at least when he went windsurfing away from the cameras — his numbers went up. I wonder if this might be part of a larger, more significant, phenomenon. Maybe progressive ideas are popular with the American people in the abstract, but when you actually hear liberals pitch them and try to explain how they’ll pay for them, a different center of the American brain fires up and says “no thanks.” We all love the idea of getting a new car; it’s only when the talk of “getting” turns to talk of “buying” that our enthusiasm sags. And that’s with a new car. When someone tries to sell you a used car at a new-car price, reality becomes even less attractive than theory. The more health-care reform is explained, the less new and the more used it seems.