Where Are The Good Guys?

by digby

There’s a lot of navel gazing about why the tea baggers are getting so much traction while the pro-reform Obama enthusaisasts seem to be dragging their feet. It’scertainly true that as Atrios and others have pointed out, it’s pretty hard to get excited about a plan that doesn’t exist, while getting people off their couches to protest a government plan to euthanize old people isn’t all that difficult. Sausage making is one thing, but the enthusiasm gap is unsurprising when we are expected to get excited about a heaping pile of fetid, decomposing mystery meat.

But there’s more to it than that I think. The Democrats gamed out a strategy in which the bills would be done by the August recess and the pols would have something concrete to take back to their districts and states. That didn’t happen, thanks to Max and Obstructors. So, they are out there having to battle back an avalanche of bullshit with more vague campaign promises about “reform.” When it became obvious they aren’t going to get it done, they probably should have held everyone in town through August — if was the right thing to do on the merits and would have had the salutory effect of avoiding the sideshow we are seeing now.

But I think the big problem is that the country is in a sour, sour mood in general and kumbaaya just isn’t selling at the moment. I think it’s a miracle that Obama has a high an approval rating as he does under these circumstances. Americans are spoiled complainers in the best of times. In bad times like this, they get downright surly.

These town hall spectacles are organized political theatre to be sure, with most of it being cynically manipulated for political reasons. But the reason they have power and salience is because they are expressing a lot of the free floating anxiety and inchoate rage that’s out there generally, not just among the crazy wingnuts. Anger, fear and frustration (the real thing, not the Hollywood, 9/11 war porn kind of fear, which is actually titillation and excitement) are what’s driving people, not the uplifting “hopenchange” of last year.

I think it’s true that it’s very difficult to expect people to get excited and come out to Town Halls to support this multi headed hydra of a health reform plan that doesn’t even yet exist. But I have my doubts that even if they had a solid bill from which they could tout all kinds of promises that people would be any more enthusiastic right now. The zeitgeist is overwhelmingly negative.

That’s why you need villains at times like this. And it took the Democrats far too long to realize that.

Update: Jonathan Cohn has some thoughts worth contemplating on all this.

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