Always August, pt 8: Acknowledgements

Will health care reform happen? Well, not in its current form (no more death panels! Yay!), but the Dems have put too much effort into this to not get some sort of bill out, just to save face. We'll see.

No matter what happens, though, we should acknowledge and thank the many disparate folks who banded together, at least temporarily, to oppose this thing. They were only loosely organized. They didn't know one another, except by reputation. Sometimes, their passion overwhelmed their reason. The whole time they were called Nazis, extremists, evil-doers, tools of the insurance industry and poor dressers. Maybe it was a quixotic last stand by a despised minority of "Radical Republicans." If so, they went out with guns blazing, exercising their rhetorical 2nd Amendment rights to the death.

There was Rush Limbaugh and the other talk radio blowhards who represented the one area of the media that discussed and dissecting the proposed bills. Rush Limbaugh regularly spent three hours of the most valuable airtime on the AM band discussing health, both the immense problems with the progressive's plans and the market based solutions that the GOP should have been pushing. Sean Hannity ran an hour long special on health care reform, looking at how it would affect all aspect of the health care system. Conservative radio was all health care, all the time. Meanwhile, the "hard news" guys in the New York/DC media weren't doing nearly as much, and what they covered tended to be process stuff; i.e. "budget reconciliation," "conference committees," "Blue Dogs," "Charles Grassley," etc. Uh, who gives a f***? There was only one place you could go where you could actually learn about what was in the proposed bills and that was conservative radio. Thanks guys.

We should also thank the army of davids out in the blogoshpere who did yeomens' work at all levels of debate. There was Keith Hennessey who really led a one-man policy charge against health care reform. There was Patterico, who discovered that a pretty doctor who asked a question at a Sheila Jackson Lee event - and received considerable local media attention - was not a doctor, but was actually an activist associated with the Obama campaign in Texas. And there were the many amateurs who managed to find parts of the proposed bills on-line and began analyzing them for no better reason than our political and media gatekeepers who insist on doing such work "for" us were not doing anything of the sort.

We also should acknowledge the efforts of Sarah Palin who is so stupid and whose career is so over that she was able to crystalize the political argument against progressive health care reform with a single posting on her Facebook page and put the entire progressive wing of the political spectrum on the defensive. "Death Panels" wasn't just a bit of heated rhetoric. It was a phrase that tied everything together: the fear of rationing, the fear of reduced care for the vulnerable, the social cons' basic suspicion of the Left as a culture of death (something that dates back to Brave New World, if not earlier), the fear of an overweening bureaucracy, and most of all a fear of a loss of freedom.

The president himself was forced to address the matter, carefully avoiding any mention of Sarah Palin's name, but failed because - it turned out - he had endorsed just such a "difficult democratic discussion" (in the NY Times!) "guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists" (thanks fellas!) and warned that "it was very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels." Hey, maybe we should convene some sort of panel! Well, we're not going to Mr. President. That might work in a nation of progressive wimps like Canada or Oregon, but not in the US. Thanks Sarah Palin for making that clear.

Mostly, there were all of those people who went to all of those town halls to, ahem, discuss the matter with their congressmen. When was the last time you went to see your congressman? I never have (what's the point when you're represented by Nancy Pelosi?), but these people did. Americans are often chastised for being apathetic and politically disconnected. Well, these folks sure weren't and they made damn sure their representatives knew about it. The Youtube videoes that began circulating on the Internet were remarkable viewing. Americans are a polite people, but we are not impressed by authority, and are quite happy to give our political leaders a piece of our minds when we feel like it.

Surely the high point of the year was the sight of constituents reading passages from the health care bill to one hapless congressman, and asking whether he would support this or that provision. Of course, he had no answer because (1) he hadn't received his instructions from the "leadership" and (2) he hadn't read the bill. If we have accomplished anything this summer, I hope we will end the "I haven't read the bill" culture that pervades Capitol Hill, and which represents a serious erosion of representative democracy

And give credit where credit is due: old pros like Ben Cardin, Clare McGaskill, and, especially Arlen Spector went into those town halls with eyes open and tried to answer their constituents' questions. They didn't do a particularly good job (McGaskill's plaintive "Don't you trust me?" was answered with a resounding "NO!"), but they went; Spector, over and over again. It was the progressives - President Obama, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and the royal rest - who wouldn't face the voters unless those voters had been pre-screened, if they faced them at all. Leftists have long used moderate liberals to advance their causes, and to take the political heat, and health care reform has been no different.

The first decade of the 21st century has not been a happy time in the US. There have been two stock market crashes, a breakdown in the financial system, and an economic depression. We saw New Orleans destroyed by a flood and the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists. We have fought two wars to an ambiguous non-conclusion in the Middle East. We have apparently become heavily indebted to the Chinese, something no American politician has dared to speak about with his constituents. We have been told that the president is "shredding the constitution," that the climate is in "crisis," and that people like Cindy Sheehan have Absolute Moral Authority, etc.

But, most of all we have seen the fraying of the political arrangements and regulatory structures that have dominated American life since at least the 1930's, and the political class that has inherited those structures have shown no great aptitude for accomplishing the sort of broad-based popular reforms that are needed. Instead, we have a Democratic Party that sees nothing wrong with proposing a huge entitlement on top of others that are already hurtling toward insolvency, and a GOP that thinks it's enough to oppose progressives and do nothing to address the problems that do exist and give rise to the Left's eternal cry that "Something Must Be Done!"

August 2009 has not been about a war between left and right. It has been about a political class that can't stop spending and arguing; and a polity that has been whipsawed by the monumental changes of the last 9 years; are apprehensive of the structural problems that are looming ever nearer; and would just as soon not let the government take over the health care system, thank you very much, no matter how much Obama's pollsters would say otherwise. We can only hope that voters remain engaged and vote into office a political class that is better able to reform health care - among other things - in a manner that will be supported by the American people.