Which Reality?

by digby

Senator Whitehouse made a stirring speech on the floor yesterday:

When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea, when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is, and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth.

So, as much as I admire Whitehouse’s passion, I’m not entirely sure he’s right about this. I would have once believed that reason would always prevail, but recent years have shown me that it’s not necessarily the way things work. We live in a strange PoMo world of swirling competing narratives and propaganda, some of which become a mythic truth regardless of their factual basis. (Al Gore wrote a whole book about this problem.)

I hope that in the long run all this will be seen as the historic progressive advance the Democrats are touting it to be. In the meantime, I suspect this fight will be ongoing for the foreseeable future and I have no doubt that the right will win at least some of the battles. I hope the Democrats are not relying on the notion that “everyone will see” how great the benefits are and hold Republican obstruction against them as they go about defending this program to the people. That’s just not enough.

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