peter hart, half of our polling team, says that in a survey he did in a focus group he did last night, people genuinely like barack obama. they call him by his first name, they feel a connection to him, yet they think that six months is too short a time period to even produce a meaningful health care plan. >> well, there is a flood of new polling out in the last couple of days, and the message across all of them is very consistent. and that is for president obama, the tide is receding. if you look at the polling earlier this year, his support kind of swelled beyond the boundaries of where he was in november of 2008 and he was drawing very strong marks, not only among groups that supported him last year, but among groups that initially were skeptical, like seniors, noncollege white men, college-educated white men. across the board, he was doing well. i think with a consistent note in this polling, something we saw very clearly in our own poll, that obama is still strong among the core groups that elected him last fall. young people, hispanics, african-american, college-educated white w

peter hart, the pollster who does the journal poll conducted outside of baltimore, you still have the reservoir for the hope for obama's administration. they were all calling him by his first name, i voted for barack. hes not out of gas at this point. we are at a tough point in the debate. >> the debate has many levels, but, john, governor dean was on and he said that if this turns out to be just insurance reform, this will be a mistake. this has to be health care reform, meaning public options, some of the early ideas we heard from candidates obama, what do they do when they return after august recess and more importantly, what does he do over the resays because time waits for no one. >> reporter: tamron, you just identified the chi decision points for people. it will be refining what is real health care reform. is it covering everybody? is it cost control? is it public option? and various groups are jockeying to define what is sort of the minimum components of reform, but i can certainly see a bill coming out, for example, in the senate finance committee, a bipartisan bill that does

but at this focus group, which was done by the democratic pollster peter hart, it was very clear thathese 12 voters, for whom voted for john mccain, one supporting ralph nader, that these 12 voters are still giving the president, wolf, the benefit of the doubt. they say the country is going to, quote, hell in a hand basket, but they believe that he shouldn't be blamed for it yet. and what was stunning to us, wolf, was that right away these voters started calling president obama "barack." they referred to him as barack and the pollster, peter hart, says it shows how powerful his personal presence still is. >> what about the president -- he's very busy talking about his respective plans. is this strategy working for him? >> i think what we saw with these voters is is they're comfortable with him. remember during the campaign, the big question about barack obama was can voters get comfortable with this man. and the answer to that is yes. but there's a downside here. they're watching him all the time, and they say, look, we think he's trying to do too much. so, they're a little worried ab

. >> in the peter hart focus group we were talking about the other day, people by large numbers saidon't like the idea of the president moving so quickly. not the gridlock they're concerned about, that taking on health care in six months is too fast, too soon. >> the president sees numbers dropping from 69% approval rating down to 53%. the president obviously feels that haste is in order. >> well, the campaign is not working, but fear of the unknown is now overcoming the promise of the unknown. let me ask lawrence, though. lawrence, john harwood said basically that the correlation of forces, i know the calendar is behind, but the correlation of forces now with business behind this. >> right. >> is so strong, that they're going to come down with something this time, and they're not going to walk away with nothing. they're not going to get the great big package. is that right? >> that's a mirage. the support on health care is always a mirage, including businesses in the different sectors, because what they're in favor of right now is nothing. there's no bill that these support groups a