Hate and fear are the only effective political messages.
2. Getting Americans to admit that ANY aspect of our society isn't the best in the world is impossible.
Fact number one is an unhappy fact of human nature far older than this country, or any current country.
Fact number two is the uniquely American flaw that will be our doom.

"... scared, gullible people." Like Chris Mathews, or any of the other corporate welfare toadies.

All too true. But it would not have been possible without the complicity of the media. Broadcasting the "death panel" bullshit using the he-said, she-said reportage method (and not doing any fact checking until weeks later) allowed that falsehood to become deeply rooted. The same with any of the other numerous falsehoods--the media would spend two weeks allowing rightwing nuts to spew their venom uncorrected, then sheepishly run short "fact-check" segments.

Hell, the NYT and WaPo have both run fawning love letters to the insurance industry as page-one above-the-fold features.

Getting a drowning country to refuse a life preserver is a very, very easy task when you have the media echoing the claim that the life preserver is made of concrete.

Since Ronald Reagan (He of Blessed Memory), the overriding Republican theme is that government is incompetent and anything the government does will only make things worse.

The obvious Democratic response should have been:

Yes, but the Republicans aren't running things anymore.

Well, there was no pro-reform selling going on. At some point we should face the fact that 25% of Democrats think selling is beneath them because the need for reform is just so self-evident, and close to 50% are in bed with the incumbent system (all the way or with one foot on the floor for the sake of appearances). That leaves -- not enough people to do the job. To turn your "old sayings" around, if you can't sell air conditioners in the desert or heaters to the Inuit, you suck.

The anti reform forces do not care about the future, or any consequences beyond THIS particular fight. It's all about winning this game, and screw the consequences.
It's the same mindset that has allowed corporate America to systematically gut functioning businesses, sell them from scrap, and leave ruins just to get a few good quarterly statements.
They have seen that we will socialize banking and business losses, and now will flog fear of socialism for the boneheads who want' to keep "government's hands off Medicare".
And it's worked well enough for us to be stuck in a fight that reason and good policy says should not happen...

See this (T.R. Reid article, Washington Post)

(via Brad Delong )

I believe there is no other modern, civilized, affluent democracy that allows right wing hate radio. If you do not have the hate=spewing demagogues, you can take the steps necessary to reign in healthcare costs and provide a system everyone can use.

Just so we understand what 'winning the debate' means here:
1. A majority of Americans favor reform including a public option.
2. A majority of the House of Representatives favor reform including a public option.
3. A majority of the Senate favors reform, but can be talked out of the public option.
4. The President favors reform but can be talked out of a public option.
5. A majority of pundits will do as they are told.

We spend twice as much to get less.

If the anti-reform groups stop reform we have to ask whether or not we can govern ourselves.

"Hate and fear are the only effective political messages."

Not so. Fercryinoutloud, PUH-leeze, enough with the excuses about how the American people are too stoopid to understand what a great thing we wanted to do... like it'll be THEIR fault when we fail 'em.

A couple suggestions:

First, it would be useful to talk about health care and insurance in less complicated ways. Here are two examples:

F'r instance, compare car insurance -- everybody who drives has to have insurance. (Universal coverage.) And the basic business model for selling car insurance is that private companies want to collect money from good drivers who will have fewer accidents (sorta like healthy people and health care), but since they are, after all, ACCIDENTS, it is good that everybody is insured because anybody might have one.

And then contrast: of course, there would be no private business model for car insurance if EVERY car was guaranteed to fall apart eventually at great cost to the owner and the insurance company. Right? But sooner or later, everybody is going to die, and for most of us (except those who have fatal car accidents, f'r instance), the last year or so of life involves exactly the kind of expensive care that no private insurance company could ever profit from having to pay.

Also -- 18,000 Americans die every year from diseases that could have been cured, or even prevented, except they couldn't afford the care OR the insurance: and of course, insurance companies can't make money off people who are about to die.

Second, stop making complex arguments to defend against simple attacks. When they say "death panels", it is not persuasive to say "the legislation doesn't say that, it says ..."

Just ask: do you want Medicare to DENY coverage for end of life counseling? And are you against REQUIRING doctors to carry out a patient's instructions, which they can change anytime they want? Or do you want politicians to choose when to ignore the patient's wishes and politicize a case, like they did with Schiavo?

Third, recognize that people can be inspired as well as intimidated. But we are rarely inspired intellectually, and never by a wimpy and complex counterpunch.

one is always left wondering, 'how do conservatives live with themselves'. The only answer you can come to is that they believe their own lies and warped distorted view of reality. From this you get to the realization that there are an awful lot of people living their lives in the paranoid, psychotic, violent, detached, manufactured reality of conservatism. And THAT is a VERY scary thought.

Conservatives are clearly people in desperate need of professional psychological help. And we are all at risk of their violent destructive ways until they get it. That they adversely influence public policy affecting the lives of millions of people with their violent dementia is nothing short of criminal.

"Left unchecked, the dysfunctional, inefficient, patchwork health care system threatens to bankrupt the country."

Yes, but, yes, but: what could possibly be worse?

-Having a black, Muslim, alien Socialist president. . .

Fear is a lower-brain function deeply rooted in our evolution. It's higher-brain step-child is hatred.

That pair trumps reason every time and Republicans know this well.

Posted by: theAmericanist on August 30, 2009 at 9:37 AM

I'd be curious to know how you square these two thought you wrote:

1) "enough with the excuses about how the American people are too stoopid to understand what a great thing we wanted to do...

2) A couple suggestions: First, it would be useful to talk about health care and insurance in less complicated ways."

They've pulled it off, so far, by telling almost comically-ridiculous lies, and managing to get scared, gullible people to believe them.

And this tactic is different from every single other right-wing con job, how, exactly? The Iraq fiasco, the "it's your money" tax cuts, 50 years of "socialized medicine!," and a presidential election where the effing candidate, not just his flying monkeys, screeched that his opponent "pals around with terrorists" among the litany of insane lies.

This is their MOA, and you'd be hard pressed to find an instance in the past twenty years where it wasn't. You might as well make this sentence a macro when discussing practically anything they do.

Never underestimate the power of the Big Lie.

What SteveT above said. Democrats have not announced in the simplest terms possible: "Yes, the government sometimes doesn't work right--its when the Republicans are in charge. See Katrina, Ronald Reagan's Savings and Loan catastrophe, Herbert Hoover's Depression, etc. etc."

"Now we're in charge. We're the party that bought you Medicare, and Social Security while fighting the Republicans who fought against those essential services."

The fact that Obama can't even bring himself to criticize the Republican party by name is telling. It's always "the opponents of Social Security/Medicare said...." At some point a real Democrat (even if its an ex-Republican like Jim Webb) will start speaking the plain truth. I hope we don't have to wait until primary season of 2012. I'm beginning to think that Obama is a nice guy walkover.

And, to emphasize Domage's point, they could not manage to do this, over and over again, if not for their iron grip on the public discourse. The MSM will not call a lie a lie, and they will not punish liars by requiring honest discourse on the "bully pulpits" they control. As long as the networks treaty politics as nothing other than two competing scams, they are complicit in scamming the public.

The reason we are having the debate is because the dems are also controlled by coporate money. Bill Moyers shared some interesting views on this with Bill Maher:

"MOYERS: I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party. This is a party that has told its progressives -- who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform -- to sit down and shut up. That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: "no public insurance option, no health care reform."

And I think the reason for that is -- in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .

Money in politics -- you’ve had in the last 30 years, money has flooded politics . .. the Supreme Court saying "money is free speech." It goes back to the efforts in the 19th Century to give corporations the right of personhood -- so if you as a citizen have the right to donate to campaigns, then so do corporations. Money has flowed in such a flood into both parties that the Democratic Party gets a lot of its support from the very interests that -- when the Republicans are in power -- financially support the Republicans.

You really have essentially -- except for the progressives on the left of the Democratic Party - you really have two corporate parties who in their own way and their own time are serving the interests of basically a narrow set of economic interests in the country -- who, as Glenn Greenwald, who is a great analyst and journalist, wrote just this week: these narrow interests seem to win, determine the outcomes, no matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter who has their hands on the levers of powers, these narrow interests determine the outcomes in Washington, even when they have to run roughshod over the interests of ordinary Americans. I’m sad to say that has happened to the Democratic Party.

I’d rather see Barack Obama go down fighting for vigorous strong principled public insurance, than to lose with a [corporate-dominated] bill . . . . the insurers are winning. Everyone already knows the White House has made a deal with the drug industry -- promising not to import cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe - promising not to use the government to negotiate for better prices -- that deal has been cut . . .

There’s this fear that Barack Obama will become the Grover Cleveland of this era - Grover Cleveland was a good man, but he became a conservative Democratic President because he didn’t fight the powerful interests - people say Obama should be FDR - I’d much rather see him be Theodore Roosevelt --- Teddy Roosevelt loved to fight - … I think if Obama fought instead of really finessed it so much . . . I think it would change the atmosphere."

These quotes are lifted from Glenn Greenwald's blog where links to the show are also provided.

Speaking of TR, the recent biography about him as a conservationist shows what a fighter he was- and how he used the Power of the Presidency to do whatever he damn well pleased.

We have a national park sysytem, as well as a multitude of other Good Things, because of his 'Bully! Bully!'. . .

Political conjobs with the American people as the marks are easy. Think "Bankruptcy Reform," think "Clear Skies Initiative," think "Patriot Act," think "Military Commissions Act." The people of this nation will buy anything that they think will keep them safe or protect their own personal pocketbook.

Health care reform will actually help everybody, but it's real easy to present it as spreading the existing health care among more people by including those who don't now have it. That means people who do have it will have less of it, and makes refom a matter of taking from the "haves" to give to the "have nots."

Con jobs always work by appealing to the greed of the "mark," and when the mark is the American people there is plenty of greed to appeal to.

The Corporate Media is singularly responsible for the collapse of this country. It is akin to the mafia. Thus, the term by Digby: 'the villagers'.

As the Americanist suggested above, the problem now is ineffective Democratic messaging and, sorry to say, lack of leadership on President Obama's part. Republicans always use the same tactics - no surprises there.

For the White House not to anticipate it and design their messaging accordingly is shameful.

For the Democratic Party not to gets its elected officials in line, letting Max Baucus, of all people, to take a leadership position on this, is typical.

Meanwhile, we get to hear John McCain every week on network TV ...

blaming all of this on lying Republicans or incompetent (or captive) media gives the Dems way too big of a pass.

Republicans have lied about such things at least since Nixon, and inept or slanted media coverage has been with us since Reagan. The Contract With America was a sham, nearly everything the W administration did was a sham and the media never exposed those - or burst the overinflated pro-Reagan hype.

Which is to say the Democrats have had decades of warning what would happen when a new Democratic President rolled out a signature initiative. Hell, we even has specific warning - we saw what happened to the Clinton health care initiative.

By this better-than-average-informed viewer's observation, we had no plan to go around the media if necessary, no plan to counter the vitriol and lies, and the Dems sat on their collective asses doing little or no counterprogramming until the lies had been taking root for weeks. And even then, as usual, we brought a figurative knife to what all too literally has become a gun fight.

Democrats do not deserve to have excuses made for them on this one. Our policies are much better, but our "leadership" just sucks.

Selling HR 3200 to the Public
August 14, 2009, 9:47AM

I've been a salesman my whole life, like my father and his father before him. Started out selling Christmas cards in August at the age of 8 from an ad I saw in a comic book on miserably hot summer days in my Sunday best so I could buy a cheesy drum set which I never learned how to play. Housewives thought I was cute and invited me in after I recited my speech and gave me lemonade while they poured over my catalog and picked out sparkly cards with wintry scenes, the baby Jesus, or snowmen on them for $2.50 per 50 cards.

I know congressmen and senators must have a little salesmen in them too. Selling themselves to voters at election time is part of the job. So why aren't they selling HR 3200? Instead of focusing on and carping about stupid Republican criticisms (it's socialism! death panels!) they should concentrate on what the bill actually does.

The way HR 3200 works:

* Health Insurance: It promotes real free markets and does away with the government protected rackets we have now. Insurance companies will have to compete in the exchange with each other and the public plan instead of the virtual monopolies they are in most states today. Insurance companies will have access to 50 million new customers who aren't insured today. Their operating costs will be lower because a lot the denial of care bureaucracy they have now won't be necessary because those practices will in fact be illegal.They can transfer a lot of those actuaries everybody hates into sales jobs where they can make people happy selling better cheaper insurance.

* Drugs: Whether through rebates like the Baucus/Obamo plan or direct government negotiation we save money. $80 billion over 10 years in the former or as Waxman and Pelosi say $120 to $140 billion by direct government negotiation.If you have a Republican House rep tell him to reject the Baucus/Obama $80 billion deal with the drug companies.Republicans love opposing anything Obama does. So ask him to support direct government negotiations of drug prices with big pharma. Canadians get much better prices than we do by doing that and they only have 30 million strong buying power. We have 330 million people. It'll cost the taxpayer, insurance companies and the consumer of the drugs much less that way. Seniors will applaud you.

* Electronic records: This is a no brainer. Even Newt Gingrich says Fed Ex keeps better track of packages than we do of health care records. He and Hillary agreed on a one page standardized form to fill out a few years ago. The VA's VistA open source record keeping system is the best in the world. They've been perfecting it since 1972. It's used by HI and WVA for their public hospitals and Germany, Finland, India, Malaysia and Jordan have adopted it. 4 or 5 more countries a week come over to check it out. There's already $20 billion in the stimulus bill for health care IT under the Hitech Act. It should all go into putting VistA in every medical and insurance office in the country. It will lower costs for insurance companies, cut out many of the 200,000 medical mistakes that kill Americans each year, doctors will love it.

* Best Medical Practices: This is a bit more complicated to explain but basically we'll reward best practices that result in best medical outcomes for patients. Sometimes that means very expensive breast cancer drugs or heart bypass operations. But in other cases sometimes that means catching conditions like diabetes before they require amputations, cancers before they've metastasized. heart disease before it requires that bypass. We'll give bonuses to doctors who keep their patients in good health and heal them instead of paying fee for service for as much as they can order. The beauty of the IT system we'll develop with VistA is that your doctor can look up what works best for people across the country just like you. 60 year old white male of German/Irish descent with stage 1 colon cancer? Sedentary lifestyle? 20 lbs over optimum weight with 12% body fat? Smoker-non smoker? Drinker-nondrinker? Your doctor can bring up the stats country wide and figure out what's worked and what doesn't whether she's a kid fresh out of med school in East Jesus KS being paid a bonus to help pay off her school loans for locating to East Jesus for a few years like the Blue Dogs want or a twenty year expert at the top of her field working on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is that new drug really better? How about that new surgical procedure or that spiffy new smart bomb guidance system cancer zapper? If it is she can prescribe it, if it's not she doesn't have to, but she'll have to show you those stats and let you decide. That's better and cheaper care for everybody.

* Benefits for Business: GM and Chrysler were canaries in the coal mine. Their legacy health care costs (paying for their retirees health insurance) bankrupted them. Our businesses simply can't compete with the Asians and Europeans on world markets paying the health care costs we are now. It's pricing our manufacturers and workers out of business. That's a big reason why GM builds more cars in Ontario than they do in Michigan these days. HR 3200 will cut those job and profit killing costs and we'll see many more new businesses open up and our big companies will thrive too. There will be no more job lock for folks who have existing conditions or love ones who do.

* Cost: The CBO says HR 3200 is deficit neutral. The cost is $1.042 trillion over 10 years. Most of it is paid for by the savings above. The rest, $239 billion over 10 years will be paid for by the expiring Bush tax cuts (make sure you mention Bush because indies and even many Repubs hate Bush now). It does not add to the US debt.

* Bottom Line: The CBO predicts under HR 3200 by 2019 97% of Americans will have health insurance. Of that number 96% will be covered by for-profit private insurance and 4% will be in the public plan. It won't drive private insurance out of business. If you like the plan you have you can keep it (or in most cases you boss can keep it.) But chances are you and your boss aren't stupid and won't choose to keep the crappy expensive plan with few safeguards and ever rising prices you have now. If you want to it's grandfathered in. Most likely you'll both probably decide to buy a new plan, probably from the same agent and company that's better and cheaper.

HR 3200 operates on real free market principles and opens up the currently government protected rackets in insurance, hospital chains, drugs and doctors to more competition. It mandates protections for consumers, you can't get booted off the rolls if you get sick, your premiums will stop skyrocketing, if you change jobs or start a business you'll still be able to buy insurance because your pre-existing conditions won't exclude you. Your doctor will be able to look up your medical records even if you've lived in 20 different towns over the last twenty years. That means if you had an allergic reaction to a drug when you were 5 it'll still be in there. It also means Rush Limbaugh won't be able to go doctor shopping for his Oxycontin.
Now put on a clean shirt, comb your hair and get yourself to a town hall meeting and bring these points up. It's not like your life doesn't depend on it or anything.

"partisanship, paranoia, and greed" aka Dick Cheney.

We spend twice as much to get less.

Of everything but FREEDOM! "Freedom" seems to be the magic word that makes selling anything, even the-opposite-of-freedom (warrantless massive surveillance of our emails and phone calls, arrest and detention without charge, e.g.) possible.

That's right, Steve, blame the oh so clever thugs for the dems pusillanimity. It reminds me of a conspiracy theory I heard last night that asserted that the dems conspired to get W in office for 8 years because they knew he was so bad that it would destroy the thug party.

Come on Steve! Don't blame the right and the Republicans.

Right will do what is in its best interest, and in this case it was to scuttle health care reform.

The problem is the Democratic Party whose most vocal members are the ones who are opposed to the basic principles of the Democratic Party. Why don't the others speak up?

It's as if the preeminent goals of Democrats is to prove the Naderian thesis about both the parties so that Republicans continue to win the election.

GAK asks how I can square -- what he exemplifies, because I said enough with the Progressive's Reflex to blame defeat on the stoopidity of the American public (rather than our self-generated failure to persuade), and then I added it would be useful to explain health care insurance in simple, rather than complex ways. He seems to think wanting a clear and simple understanding is a mark of unintelligence.

Look, GAK: it takes brains to explain complex stuff simply. It is a mark of ignorance and shallow thinking when you can't explain even the most complicated stuff in simple ways.

And it is something worse when you could -- but WON'T.

That's why I used car insurance as a f'r instance. As we're proposing to do with health insurance, it's universal: if you drive, you have to have insurance. Since this is familiar to folks, it creates traction to talk about how THIS should be like THAT.

Going too fast for you? Or are you mentally conjuring up a list of things not explained by the analogy?

Then I noted that there's a difference between car insurance and health insurance, particularly as a profitable private business. Private companies sell car insurance because good drivers are good risks, and it's a good deal for even a very good driver, because there are these things called "accidents", which can happen to anybody at any time (hence the name).

But of course if car insurance was like health insurance, EVERY car would sooner or later have a catastrophic accident and cease to run, after costing far more than the insurance company could profitably pay out.

See? It's a simple comparison between a system every adult already has and is familiar with, which sets up the problems we're trying to fix. It doesn't talk down to anybody, doesn't say "trust us, we're experts", isn't vulnerable to the kind of simple and clear "death panel" charge that, in our oh-so-precious style, we utterly fail to persuade by responding in complex and opaque ways.

But you see, it's not so much the lack of a simple, homey way to talk about these issues that's crippling progressives. It's not even the old political saw that when you're 'xplaining, you're losing.

It's the impulse -- which YOU exemplify, GAK -- to insist that these issues are so complex that they can't be explained simply. That's obviously false, but it isn't the core problem: progressives have a compulsion to believe that because THEY understand complex issues better (which we often don't, but that's beside my point) makes US better than ordinary people who can't appreciate nuance...

We seem to honestly believe that the more we explain, the more right we are -- even as we steadily lose ground.

And that's why we might actually lose this one. We're already blaming the public for our own failures: look at these threads.

I was pretty confident even two weeks ago, but the way you guys typify the 'blame the public first' 'tude makes me wonder.

When FDR closed the banks, he didn't call it an emergency, which is what it was, and he spent no time at all discussing the many reasons for doing it. He just did it, and called it a "holiday". Nice, friendly word. He said what they were doing -- sorting out the good banks from the bad banks: simple, clear -- and confident. Will Rogers pointed out that Franklin had explained finance so clearly even the bankers finally understood it.

When FDR abandoned his campaign pledge to balance the budget and ran up the deficit to stop the economy's free fall (sounds familiar), he said: Well, we owe the money to ourselves, after all, so it will come out alright.

Simple. Clear. Confident. He never talked down to anybody.

Do you guys imagine that the role of financial institutions in the economy was LESS complex in FDR's day -- when he separated home loans from commercial banking, when he put Joe Kennedy, of all people, in charge of stopping stock manipulation?

What, do you think the impact of deficit spending, or of taking us off the gold standard so the dollar floated against European currencies, were SIMPLE matters? Nonsense -- but FDR resolved 'em by stating clearly that the United States wasn't going to finance Europe's economic recovery at our expense.

Simple. Clear. Confident. That's how we should be talking about all of the progressive agenda.

Got it now, GAK?

Steve;
Please, lets acknowledge that it's not just the Republicans selling the sand here. A majority of Democrats will eventually vote for a package that essentially fluffs the edges and produces zero substantive benefits or reform.

The way it works is that the democrats will watch the republicans define the issue and agree with them in the end that whatever insignificant tweaks they can put together to assuage the public in their districts will 'have to be good enough'. "We really tried hard but the Republican opposition was just too much folks". And they will do this so that they don't endanger their campaign contributions from industry.

The truth of this post says less about the Republicans and their allies and more about the corporate media and those of us who are willing to believe the nonsense.

(in a Canadian-style, socialized system)

Please don't call our system socialized. It's not because I don't like the taint of socialism (I'm a socialist), it's because the term "socialized medicine" refers to a system completely under government control, a la the NHS. Canadian health care practitioners are usually in private practise, and hospitals and clinics are not under government control. Canada instead is described as "single-payer", in that basic health care is covered under a government-supplied insurance system. Extended health coverage is available through private insurance.

This misuse of the "socialized" term is a purposeful smear by those opposed to universal coverage in order to create fear in the minds of Americans, who have an extraordinary fear of government involvement in anything. Which is ironic, seeing as it's one of the most autocratic industrialized societies.

Posted by: theAmericanist on August 30, 2009 at 12:14 PM

funny how when confronted with the simple conflict in your comments you launch into diatribe rather than explain your self-contradiction. Is that your insecurity, stoopidity (your spelling), or are you just enamored of hearing yourself talk even as you're incapable of a cogent discussion?

LOL -- GAK, you proven it again.

For one thing, you don't seem to know what a contradiction is. Contradiction happens when someone makes two statements that are mutually exclusive, or critically inconsistent. I did no such thing -- but even after I showed you, ya didn't get it.

To help you out further with your public education, when Senator Coburn said he was going to have his staff help out the woman with the brain damaged husband, because it's important to keep the government out of health care -- that's a contradiction, since his staff IS the government.

It is NOT a contradiction to urge progressives (like you, GAK) to give up with the notion that the public is too stooopid to understand the issues, and to urge further that we say what we want to do more simply and clearly.

There is nothing inconsistent, or mutually exclusive about those two sentences. That you figure there MUST be, is a sign that you're dumber than I thought. You really do think people who appreciate simplicity and admire clarity must be stooopid.

Says more about you than the public, methinks. Both statements are entirely consistent -- the public is easily intelligent enough to understand health care reform, AND it would be smart for progressives to explain the issues clearly and simply.

As I noted, your objection amounts to the false Notion that these issues can only be described in a complex way. This demonstrates ignorance, because they can be discussed in simple terms, and arrogance, because your bias toward complexity is also (as you've twice demonstated) rooted in the notion that the public is, so!, too stooopid (um, my spelling) to perceive what you understand, in your brilliance.

No wonder August hasn't been kind to us. There is nothing more fatal to an attempt to persuade the public than the kind of arrogance GAK demonstrates here -- twice!, so far.

In previous times, the Right's scam wouldn't work because enough responsible media types like Cronkite would have exposed it, and enough responsible Republicans would have agreed or at least attacked their own worst vermin. But something went wrong between then and now, and we need to at least try to pull up some comp.

BTW - sure, the public isn't too stupid to *understand* the issues. They have the capacity, they are just too manipulated by "primitive circuits" that the Right manipulates in creepy ways.

25% of Democrats think selling is beneath them because the need for reform is just so self-evident True, and the same arrogance came up in 2004 with Bush: Kerry's people (like fool Schrum) were so sure it was "self-evident" that Bush was an idiot and dishonest, etc. so of course he'd lose the election.

NeilB writes: "the public isn't too stupid to *understand* the issues.... just too manipulated by "primitive circuits" that the Right manipulates in creepy ways."

Same excuse in different clothes.

Look, this happens so often and so easily it really would help to actually NOTICE how it works: issues are a vehicle for images. Imagery is the foundation for victory.

Progressives come up with a good idea or candidate, like health care reform or Dukakis. The bad guys find a vulnerability -- the legislation requires Medicare pay for end of life consultations, Dukakis once vetoed an unConstitutional bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance. (I think, I forget the specifics.) So the bad guys attack "death panels", and accuse Dukakis of despising the Pledge, and the flag, and America itself....

Oy. The first five times they did it to us, there might have been some excuse for not getting better. But face it, if you can't hit curves you don't belong in the big leagues.

The thing is, no matter how effectively you defend yourself against charges like this: you're still on defense. You can't score enough to win playing defense.

So what you WANT, is to not get on defense in the first place. And your goal on defense is to get back on offense as quickly as possible.

Progressives spend WAY too much time dissecting and refuting the bad guys' attacks in detail. Why? Because we like it -- because it makes us feel superior to that vast American public that, we complain (like puritans re-reading porn, in case we missed something particularly wicked the first few times), is oh, so easily manipulated.

Bullshit. When we get beat, it's because we failed to persuade the public, not because they're dumb.

We still suffer from Adlai Stevenson disease: when he was running for President back in the day, somebody shouted out to him: "All thinking Americans are with you!", and he couldn't resist calling back: "Thanks, but I need a majority!"

80% of the posts and 95% of the comments on this blog are reiterations of the Stevenson arrogance.

It's not complex: images persuade more effectively than ideas. They're more concrete, less abstract. (That's why the actors in tv commercials look the way they do.) It's not a sign of intelligence to sneer at what's effective; it's a sign of bone-deep stooopidity.

Issues are a vehicle for images. It doesn't particularly matter if an unpopular image has a more powerful argument in the abstract: this is a democracy, which is always concrete. The image that Democrats have created for health care insurance reform is that it is complex, untried, involves trade-offs and that people have a lot to lose if it doesn't work.

Don't kid yourselves: that's not a delusional image, either. Folks like to say that 15-20% of health insurance is waste -- but that 15-20% is also income to somebody, who doubtless works hard and believes fervently that they earn their money, and resent the idea that it can be taken away for a 'better' system. 40 million Americans are uninsured -- that means 260 million ARE.

Yet Steve is baffled: how could the Republicans have managed to persuade the public that reform is risky? The question answers itself -- if you're that out of touch, if you haven't noticed the half century of failed efforts, no wonder you get struck out, looking.

The image that Republicans have created is that they are listening to a vocal grassroots movement that may be misguided but has not been mollified. The issue is "divisive".

Y'all may bitch that this isn't true, the polling data shows otherwise, that if this hadn't happened but that had, instead... still, in the end, you're bitching that it's not our fault.

Yes, it is. There are simple, clear ways to say what's wrong with what we got, and how we can make it better.

I suggested a couple -- using car insurance as an example, and responding to the 'death panel' charge by asking if Medicare should REFUSE to pay for end of life counseling when a patient wants it.

I haven't seen many other suggestions, but I have seen a LOT of kvetching about how stooopid the public is, so it's not our fault if we can't persuade 'em. What does that tell ya?

BTW -- Adlai Stevenson lost, btw. Twice.

Moyers and Greenwald know the score. Of course, so do Obama and Emmanuel. They're on the same page. The only difference being that the former speak plainly.

What on earth was Obama thinking when he cut a closed door deal with big Pharma? That it could be kept under wraps? Who the hell does Emmanuel think he is, throwing a temper tantrum with congressional democrats simply because they disagree with his arrogant ass? If I'd been in that room, we would have squared off.

In January, the president could reasonably bill himself as The Great Pragmatist. But he's bent over far too many times since, and those days are gone forever.

But that's not quite right. He could still regain the trust of those who elected him if he dropped the hammer on the GOP. If he threw in with congressional progressives, employed his rhetorical firepower in their cause, and rammed home a generational victory. He might lose, (as Moyers noted) but better that than hollow, compromised capitulation to a sinister opposition.

I still think it do-able. If nothing else, it would separate the goats from the sheep in his own party. Barring that? A republican-lite party is one corrupted beyond hope repair. It will be time for the emergence of a third party.

I would agree with Adlai Stevenson arrogance. Good post.

I heard John Kerry on the TV this morning, when asked about the public option, respond, very firmly, that the Democrats are going to have follow Ted Kennedy's legacy and COMPROMISE.

That's the new message from the party, in case you missed it.

And John Kerry would never have said such a thing if Barak Obama was not on board.

I think it's what Obama wanted all along.

So fine, no problem, forget about the public option. Just, as other countries have done, eliminate all for-profit health insurance. Should have more or less the same effect.

Americans, who have an extraordinary fear of government involvement in anything

This isn't necessarily true. Americans, particularly conservatives, love government involvement in a great many things, to wit:

*Big farmers and agricorps love government involvement in providing huge subsidies for commodity crops.

*Energy and other extractive industries absolutely adore government involvement in giving them huge tax cuts and cheap access to resources on public land.

*Conservative white people have absolutely no problem with a huge government that unconstitutionally detains, abuses, tortures, etc. as long as they can be fairly certain such things will only happen to poor brown people they don't know, like migrant laborers, black teenagers, or Muslim-types.

So for many Americans, especially your average Fox-viewing demographic, Big Government is great, as long as it lines the pockets of the wealthy, and comes down hard on Those People. The second Your Tax Dollars might be used to help Those People, or not line the pockets of other white, conservative corporate interests, well, then it's Tree of Liberty waterin' time.

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I have to disagree with the Back to Basics strategy. Republicans already say they agree that the healthcare system needs fixing. As long as the discussion is that abstract, they get to make themselves look nice and cooperative. The problem is the details of what to do about it. The Democrats haven't delivered much of a message other than that if you want to keep what you have, you can. The Republicans have managed to invent a "cut taxes so people can pay for their own" message that of course is not a solution but always works politically. On top of that they've filled the void Democrats have left as far as details with lies. Game over.

Aw, shucks. Let's give some real credit to the Liberal & "centrist" Dems, not just the good ol' Conservatives.

Since this tactic has ALWAYS worked before, wouldn't you think the Democrats would have developed a counter-strategy by now? IMHO, that's more amazing than the yak manure the Conservative GOP spreads religiously over every issue.

Nope. The only Democratic strategy I cynically observe, is that of the entire litter of Blue Dog Dems: agree with the GOP, & rake in the campaign funds. This must be the new definition of "bi-partisan".

No, the Blue Dogs don't agree with Republicans, and they're not just in it for campaign contributions. That 'tude is a potentially big mistake.

Many Blue Dogs represent districts that do not usually elect Democrats, and which voted for McCain over Obama. They are also the balance of the Democratic majority in the House.

So it's pretty simple: if we can't craft a health care bill, with a legislative and political strategy, which enough Blue Dogs can run on for re-election, we won't win.