Watching a Republican anti health care reform, state senator take over Ted Kennedy's seat feels a little like watching Thurgood Marshal's seat go to Clarence Thomas.
While we were all too busy patting ourselves on the back and rubbing our teary eyes at the heart stopping image of who was bounding out of Air Force One we took our eyes off the prize. The fundamentalists did not. With the right wing media machine as Turf Grow they created something that looks and talks like a grass roots movement.
The "ReFoxicans", have spent every minute of every day since the election tirelessly hurling buckets of anti Obama spaghetti against the wall watching to see what was sticking - he bows too low, he thinks too much, he prefers shaking hands instead of fists, he is going to kill grandma, he's not an American, his speech about the undabomber wasnt soon enough. In the media war vacuum created by the lack of a counter message from our side the wing nuts finally got a few noodles to stick. Before we knew it every day people were spitting back spoon fed sound bites about big government and the projected cost of the health care legislation like street corner policy wonks who had come up with this stuff on their own. Once again - the other side's trial lawyers were better jury bamboozlers than our guys.
Obama won because he is an extraordinary individual, stepping into a perfect storm of an economy in collapse and the 8 year Bush train wreck. It helped that he was up against a cranky old war hero with a fake smile, who thought Governor Ubetcha Okie Dokie would make a fine back up custodian of the nuclear war codes. In contrast Obama stepped up to the plate and brilliantly energized an army of the ticked off who wanted their country back. People sacrificed, mobilized and hit the streets with a passion that the country hasn't seen in a long time.
When the campaign was over exhausted teary strangers all over the country were embracing and whispering -"yes we did".
Overnight, the troops were sent home, the lights turned off and the machinery dismantled. Now we sit at home reading the papers and opening robo e-mails from the President, telling us to hang in there and asking for money.
Ask every Palin, Glenn Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh devotee to tell you what they don't like about the Democratic health care bill and they have a list of prepackaged talking points they can parrot back from death panels to budget deficits and then the old - lets not get bogged down in reality standby - "its socialism".
Boy oh boy, these guys are good! They would have gotten an A+ in Professor Goebbels "Big Lie 101" graduate seminar. They picked the third rail word of American politics that has nothing to do with anything actually happening on earth and it worked like a charm.
Ask me to tell you how the new health care proposal would work and I couldn't. Reforming health care should have been about a one sentence idea that all of us could have been out there fighting for at the water coolers and in the local greasy spoons Instead we're stuck with 1000 incomprehensible pages of legislation and the people on our side who can explain it are walking talking mega doses of Ambien.
Its better to take a straight forward simple position -
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insure the uninsured because doing nothing is the road to a budget busting disaster, morally wrong and not what America is all about" Lets draw the line and then go down swinging. It's got to be better than the way things feel right now. Let the Republicans go into the next election as the party of insurance industry whores who think doing nothing to provide medical care for approximately one sixth of the US population is a good idea.
