I actually heard Axelrod explain that they deliberately decided NOT to go into details about the health care bill to avoid the Hillary-care debacle of 1993. He said the mistake was giving too many details out that the opposition could focus on, thus leading to its eventual demise.
However, what he's failing to see is that that strategy is failing, too. No one in the White House has written details except the spoken platitudes, however, the many versions out there have horrible items in them that can be strongly opposed, and all they can say is that is not in the bill!? Of course, real people reading one of the real bills then see with their own eyes what's in them and—well, it appears to them that the White House is calling them either liars or stupid or both. So real people are naturally getting angry.
Sometimes the best thing to do when you're not getting anywhere is to stop, reassess, and try another course of action. If you're committed to the plan and the plan is visibly failing, yet you continue to follow the plan thinking that it's perfect and things will eventually work out; you're going to lose. It's like watching a military campaign fail. The analogy of Hitler in his bunker moving nonexistent units around the map comes to mind, but that would be comparing dems to Nazis and we're told by the state run media not to do that....