A brilliant post by George Lakoff over at Daily Kos. It's a tad long, but even just reading the first half will open your eyes with wonder. A lot of our readers have asked us, "but what SHOULD Obama have done?" Lakoff tells you. (One quibble: Lakoff lumps "blogs" in with the usual suspects Obama has been using to date to fight for health care reform. That's wrong. Obama's people have barely used for the blogs for anything since they've taken office. Lots of folks are to blame for the fiasco that is becoming health care reform. We are not one of them.)
Barack Obama ran the best-organized and best-framed presidential campaign in history. How is it possible that the same people who did so well in the campaign have done so badly on health care?
And bad it is: The public option may well be gone. Neither Obama himself nor Senior Advisor David Axelrod even mentioned the public option in their pleas to the nation last Sunday (August 16, 2009). Secretary Sibelius even said it was “not essential.” Cass Sunstein’s co-author, Richard Thaler, in the Sunday NY Times (August 16, 2009, p. BU 4) called it “neither necessary nor sufficient.” There has been a major drop in support for the president throughout the country, with angry mobs disrupting town halls and the right wing airing its views with vehemence nonstop on radio and tv all day every day. As the NY Times reports, Organizing for America (the old Obama campaign network) can’t even get its own troops out to work for the President’s proposal.
What has been going wrong?
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