Although Congressional Republicans know they won't be able to repeal the entirety of the landmark federal health care bill signed into law earlier this year, many of them insist that they'll be able to kill it ever so softly, by starving provisions of the bill individually when they come up for a vote in the GOP controlled House, and hopefully then have a Republican president kill it outright in 2013.

The underlying supposition is that it's considered a "monstrosity" with the American people, and lots of Democrats appeared to buy into that assumption, rarely campaigning it for as the party took huge losses in federal, state and even local elections earlier this month.

If that's the conventional wisdom, what are we supposed to think now that a new poll produced by McClatchy-Marist shows that inf fact 51% of those surveyed said they want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44% want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether.  That's a wee bit different than what we've been told is the overwhelming distaste for the legislation.

"The political give and take is very different than public opinion," said Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which conducted the poll. "On health care, there is a wide gap between public opinion and the political community."

Of the 51% who support the law, 16% like it as is, while another 35% want it to be expanded to do more.  Among those who want to expand it include women, minorities, people younger than 45, Democrats, liberals, Northeasterners and those making less than $50,000 a year.

Perhaps this survey is an outlier, and goes against the consensus of  what other polls have indicated.  Then again, it's the most recent survey conducted nationally, post midterm election.

Not that this would matter to the "hard right" Republicans (in Dean Cannon's words) that now dominate the state Legislature, including the leaders of the House and Senate.  They are determined to do what they can from their perch in Tallahassee to make sure that Floridians won't reap the benefits of the federal legislation.

This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2010.