Oh, Peggy Noonan. My love-hate-indifference-make me sleepy relationship with you has swung, once again. And so, I will now dissect your latest fluffy, soft and “Little nemo in dreamland” scribblings about the Town Hall chaos. Do you mind? Do I care?
We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.
It seems desperate to you. To me, it seems determined and resolute in the face of organized chaos, fomented by people who refuse to believe they lost.
I’m actually proud of the fact that these people aren’t folding like paper nothings anymore. They are clawing back and showing spine.
They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.”
Whatever. Maybe that was said with a grain of salt. Maybe it was said as a joke. And who the hell are you to say “they shouldn’t have pushed a national health-care plan?” Obama RAN on that. He promised it.
Excuse him for honoring his word, and doing what he said he would do.
When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.
In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.
Please, Peggy. Tell me your interpretation of this.
I still remember you as the light and airy Republican shill who said nice things about Palin when the cameras were running, but then “slipped up” and was honest about her with the camera off.
You know who your base is and you’re playing to it.
And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos.
Yeah. I’d have shock on my face too if neanderthals were screaming nonsense at me. It’s the same look I get when I pass a homeless person screaming “COOKIE! CHARLES MANSON! PICKLE!”
They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.
When Obama won, the country screamed “Do something!” This was after the election, but before Obama took office, and Bush basically sat on his thumbs and tried to figure out what quadrant of brush he would clear. So… Obama DID something. And the same people who hated the fact that he won, hated what he did. Are you really saying that regular, workaday, nine-to-five people processed this the way you are right now?
That they don’t want a “huge entitlement?” Sorry. Drifting off now. What?
Maybe a small handful. But, like the tea parties, they are being led – as they were during the Iraq war – to the conclusions that the people they back want them to believe. This isn’t a groundswell, this is the choir, hearing the preacher, and agreeing.
The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”
Honestly. I’m going to listen to this from a woman that I think would be terrified of an African-American business man walking toward her on the street?
You know what’s terrifying? The screaming, sheepish, hateful bleat of a handful of operatives that have the ability to drag other people along in the wake of their fear.
You know what’s terrifying? These people suppressing calm debate. If they went to a town hall meeting and calmly confronted, forcefully asked or vehemently opposed, then there would be a robust discussion that would probably spread across the country like wild fire.
This is not that.
If the anti-Obamacare side is so clear cut and so obvious, that case should be able to be made in a conversation. Not by a bunch of people who want to double check a birth certificate because they can’t believe a black man won the white house.
I’m more terrified of the side that killed George Tiller, or shot a guard at a holocaust museum. Do you really expect me to believe that people are rising up in the streets to fight AGAINST health care? Sorry. Not buying it.
What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town-hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.
People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.
Or are the same sore loser, 20-something percent of the nation that still thinks George Bush was a good president because they are single issue voters.
What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.
And some of the more important members of the opposition have been equating Obama to Stalin, and Socialism, since day one. The guy didn’t get a honeymoon, let alone a sleep over.
Carrying a swastika sign with a slash on it is still saying Obama is Hitler, and if you don’t understand that, you need to surrender your metaphor card.
Nobody was calling these people Nazis – it’s the opposite. There is resentment from Dems and Independents that suddenly they and their president, is being equated with Hitler.
Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town-hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed,” that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.
Wrong. It is about him, and the policies he represents. In a parallel universe, where a white Democrat male won the election and pushed all these policies – this debate is softer and less hateful… and you know that.
The Democratic National Committee chimed in with an incendiary Web video whose script reads, “The right wing extremist Republican base is back.” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse issued a statement that said the Republicans “are inciting angry mobs of . . . right wing extremists” who are “not reflective of where the American people are.”
But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems “fishy,” you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight “intentionally misleading” information.
And here, we agree. This was a bad idea.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday wrote to the president saying he feared that citizens’ engagement could be “chilled” by the effort. He’s right, it could. He also accused the White House of compiling an “enemies list.” If so, they’re being awfully public about it, but as Byron York at the Washington Examiner pointed, the emails collected could become a “dissident database.”
Two parts: One, the only people chilling citizen engagement are the screaming buttholes that won’t let a townhall happen for fear of a reasoned debate. Let’s be clear: I dont know enough about the plan, and I’m not sold on it. But I will be damned before I let some uninformed shill scream down the discussion. You yell, you lose me.
All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.
Not if they’re shouting down discussion, they’re not. Not if they’re denying the President is legitimate, they’re not. Not if they’re bigots, they’re not. Respect needs to be earned. You want to blame someone for the lack of respect these people are getting, blame people like Glenn Beck (who just threatened to poison Nancy Pelosi, by the way. Nice.) who have been railing against and rooting against this president since day 1.
They lit that fuse. They brought the socialist, nazi, fascist, freedom, name-calling into it.
So let’s say, for a moment, some of this fury is legit. It’s lost, in the chaos and the clamor, of 200 days of television “news” which is really nothing more than fear used for commerce.
And that, my friend, is YOUR PARTY’s fault. Not the Democrats. If this was the first thing people complained about, chances are it would resonate. That it’s the latest thing – since they’ve been screaming about everything since the election – mutes its significance. You are the boy that cried “Fascist.”
The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is, the big mic.
Good luck with some guy in the back screaming “Baby killer” every time you turn around.
And frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.
This is either naive, or a lie. I don’t know what bugs me more. There isn’t a single person in the right wing blog-o-news-o-sphere that is saying “Lets stop this so we can have a health care discussion later!” If that was truly the case, then guess what? It would have happened in 1995 after it failed the first time.
The attempt to stop this now, is an attempt to kill it for the generation. Regardless of whether you want this to happen or not, let’s agree on that.
You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor.
Thank you, Mommy.
And the Republicans would say thank you and they would be equal partners in trying to make this happen. Except, this is Earth, and bi-partisan reach outs didn’t work, because the party that lost power would rather see American fall apart than work with a Democrat.
Him reaching across the aisle was seen as an act of weakness. So, of course the strength that is being shown is baffling. You’re used to Dukakis. And Carter (Who, by the way, builds houses for the poor, but whatever). People who turned the other cheek so many times they ran out of square inch of body space to slap.
Of course these people – this small minority – is freaking out. The old stuff isn’t working, so this is an attempt to toss over the chess board and start again.
Absent that, and let’s assume that won’t happen, the health-care protesters have to make sure they don’t get too hot, or get out of hand. They haven’t so far, they’ve been burly and full of debate, with plenty of booing. This is democracy’s great barbaric yawp. But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.
Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.
The discussion turned into a fight when thugs showed up to shout down dissent.
It’s going to be a long August, isn’t it? Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.
Then keep your bullies on a leash. Because most of us want to talk.
Now have some milk, and get some rest.
