More than a month ago Politico's Ben Smith reported that advocates of health care reform were altering their public relations strategy, because the Affordable Care Act was proving to be a lot less popular than they had hoped. They would stop talking about its potential to save money, since nobody seemed to believe that claim, and start vowing to fix its flaws.

The article generated a lot of push-back and, to this day, I'm not sure exactly what was and wasn't said in the meeting that generated Smith's story. But it was consistent with other reports floating around at the time. And it's turned out to be prescient. Most Democrats campaigning for election right now have downplayed health care reform, except for those who have actually boasted of their votes against it.

You can understand why a lot of Democrats are doing this. The polls are a bit all over the place, but, in general, they show more people disapprove of the Affordable Care Act than approve of it. But the public's frustration with health care reform reflects, among other things, a lot of confusion. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, for example, 30 percent of seniors thought the new law will give a Medicare panel authority to make life-or-death treatment decisions and 39 percent thought it would diminish the benefits that Medicare guarantees to all seniors. (Large numbers were also uncertain whether these false claims were true.)

Meanwhile, the actual elements of reform--like prohibiting insurers from excluding people with pre-existing conditions--remain wildly popular. And that same Kaiser poll suggested voters were pretty much split on whether they were more or less likely to support a member of Congress that voted for the Act.