Americans are very confused and believe lots of contradictory things. Remember, something like 3/4 of Bush voters in 2004 thought he supported the Kyoto Protocol. But a lot of Americans agreed with Bush when he vetoed the SCHIP child health insurance bill, denouncing it as socialized medicine. You can get them to agree on specific things, but then their support will weaken if you bring up some bullshit principle like "government programs are bad." And they won't vote for candidates who support things they're supposed to like, and vice versa. It's a damned mess.
[WS:] Actually, it isn't if you look at this from a cognitive framing perspective. People's perceptions of individual issues are determined by cognitive frames in which these issues are placed. That is, they may take a favorable attitude toward an issue placed in one frame, and a disfavorable attitude when the same issue is framed differently. Thus, they may support single payer health care if it is framed, say, as a cost saving measure, but they will oppose it if it is framed as something contradicting the "American identity" (i.e. "bringing socialism to the US.") Likeiwse, people will support helping children if it is framed as "charity for the innocents or less fortyunate" but they will oppose it if framed as 'government-sanctioned entitlement to the undeserving segments of the population."
The right wing in this country has been extremely succesful in inculacting the public with the right wing framing of most social issues. The liberals totally lost ground in this respect. Therefore, when you ask people's opinions privately, they are more likley to view these issues in a liberal or compassionete framing, but that framing disappears and is repleced by a conservative one when the same issue enter the public discourse.
I observed that phenomenon in former socialist countries - whatever people's opinions were on an issue, those opinions were always trumped by the offcial frame imposed by the propaganda apparatus when discussed in public, even by the opponents of the regime. It is easy to condemn such changes in attitudes as some form of "moral failure" e.g. hypocrisy, flip-flopping, cowardice, or being irrational, but such condemanations do not explain why such changes are so wideley spread. But from the cognitive framing perspective, the changes are a natural outcome of how people actually think (as opposed to how they should think.)
The only way to change voting behavior on these issue in this country is to legitmize liberal framing of these issues in the public discourse. I think Obama is the only post-Reagan Democratic politician who had some, albeit limited, success in this area.
Wojtek