Hillary's Revenge

Peggy Noonan senses desperation on the part of the Democrats:

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.

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.” 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.

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. 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.

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.”

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.

Exactly. Obama tried to urge his own followers to show up at these meetings and support his plan but only handfuls have appeared. Even his own followers aren't that enthused about Obamacare.

So now he has resorted to paid thugs from the unions to try and protect Democrats from the angry voters. That's gonna backfire. There's even video evidence of the thugs at work. How is that going to win the argument?

The health care program is dying, but unfortunately Washington has a bad case of "do-something-itus" which is a mental illness that demands that something be done even it if would make things worse. That's why I believe there will be a health care bill of some kind just because Obama needs a win and the Democrats, combined with some weak Republicans, will want to give it to him. It may not look like anything we are seeing today, but there will be a bill that will be called "health reform" and chances are it will be terribly expensive and completely useless in solving what it perceived to be the problem of the uninsured. It will certainly be an incremental step toward socialized medicine.

There's still a chance to stop it, but some congressmen will have to be scared away from this bill by their voters before that will happen.