Polls taken immediately after President Obama's health care speech to Congress indicate that many were pleased and excited about what he had to say about health reform. Congresswoman Maxine Waters thinks he hit it out of the park and rallied the Democrats. Surprisingly the online commentary isn't really showin

g that.

Lindsay Beyerstein at RHRealityCheck was less than inspired by what the President had to say:

Instead of presenting a vision and asking Congress to line up behind him, the president stressed that he was synthesizing a compromise position incorporating ideas from the left and the right. Instead of a coherent vision, the president’s scheme sounds more like a last-ditch compromise plan to enable him to declare victory. Like many Democrats, the president seems to be confusing the strategic with the expedient.

Even if details are still missing, Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine believes it was still an important moment for the President:

The White House promised more detail ..., and in that sense, the speech delivered--if only to make more explicit many of the things that Obama has only tacitly dealt with before. But it was a move that was badly needed at this moment. Within the House Chamber, he has provided the guidance that lawmakers have been begging for. But the real question is this: Has Obama provided the reassurance it will take to bring back the rest of the country?

Maybe not. Jessica Mador at Minnesota Public Radio writes that one couple she talked to is glad that the President is committed to change, but they're worried that it won't come soon enough:

In Little Falls, Minn., Heather Dehn-Brastad and her husband are both self-employed, and they can't afford health insurance for them and their four children. [Heather is] looking for answers.

"I'm hearing a solution to people who don't have insurance but I didn't hear it coming quickly," she said. "There was some talk about within four years putting people like myself in a group that would be eligible for applying for insurance at more like the same cost that employers can get insurance for, but I thought four years would be a little longer than I was hoping to wait."

While Jane Hamsher writes at the Huffington Post that it felt like the President was backtracking from the public option, which could be the undoing of health reform on both sides of the aisle:

At some point there will be a day of reckoning when the public understands that the public option is gone. But getting there will be tricky, and in the mean time the White House wants to stop their opponents -- and let's face it, progressives who are insisting on the inclusion of a public plan are at this point their opponents -- from being able to exploit that gap. Because with every day that goes by, the base gets more and more wedded to the promise of a public plan, encouraged by the positive rhetoric of the President himself. It becomes that much harder for the White House to extract itself from the enthusiasm they assist in fostering without paying a huge political price.

So while the poll numbers suggest people were pleased with what the President had to say, commentary online indicates the opposite.

While some of us may have felt better at the end of the President's speech, Barack Obama is now between that dreaded rock and a hard place. He's going to have to face his progressive supporters and be able to explain why a public option died if that happens. And trust me, that won't be pretty.

The rumblings of the "netroots" who put him in office are starting a drumbeat to insist on that.

After all, health care for all was a centerpiece of his call for "change we can believe in."

I want to believe.

BlogHer Politics & News Contributing Editor Joanne Bamberger also writes about politics at her place, PunditMom. In her "spare" time, Joanne is at work on a book about the increasing political involvement of mothers (Bright Sky Press, Fall 2010).

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