By Dorothy Rabinowitz - The Wall Street Journal
The president shouldnt worry about the protestors disrupting town hall meetings. He should worry about the Americans who have been sitting at home listening to him.
It didnt take chaotic town-hall meetings raging demonstrators and consequent brooding in various sectors of the media to bring home the truth that the campaign for a health-care bill is to put it mildly not going awfully well.
Its not hard now to envision the state of this crusade with just a month or two more of diligent management by the Obama teamthink train wreck. It may one day be otherwise in the more perfect world of universal coverage but for now disabilities like the tone deafness that afflicts this administration from the top down are uninsurable.
Consider former ABC reporter Linda Douglassnow the presidents communications director for health reformwho set about unmasking all the forces out there always trying to scare people when you try to bring them health insurance reform." People she charged are taking sentences out of context and otherwise working to present a misleading picture of the presidents proposals. One of her key solutions to this problemher justly famed message encouraging citizens to contact the office at
flag@whitehouse.gov if they got an email or other information about health reform that seems fishy"set off a riotous flow of online responses. (The word fishy" with its police detective tone would have done the trick all by itself.)
These commentaries packed with allusions to the secret police the East German Stasi and Orwell were mostly furious. Others quite simply hilarious. Ms. Douglass who now has in her public appearances the air of a person consigned to service in a holy order was not amused.
Neither has she seemed to entertain any second thoughts about the tenor of a message enlisting the public in a program reeking of a White House effort to set Americans against one anotherthe good Americans protecting the presidents health-care program from the bad Americans fighting it and undermining truth and goodness.
She intended no such outcome doubtless. That this former journalist now a communications director failed to notice anything amiss in the details of that communiqu is a bit odd but not altogether surprising.
Crusades are busy endeavors the enlistees in this one like those in every undertaking of this White House concerned with just one message. Which is that the Obama administration is in possession of vital answers to ills and inequities that have long afflicted American society (whether Americans know it or not) and that those opposed to those answers and that vision are cynics or operatives of the powerful vested interests responsible for the plight Americans find themselves in (whether they know it or not) or political enemies bent on destroying the Obama administration.
It shouldnt have been surprising either that the tone of much of the commentary on the town-hall protests was what it was. There was Mark Halperin for one senior political editor for Time bouncing off his chair Sunday in agitation over all the media coverage of this rowdinessa horrible breakdown of our political culture our media culture" and so bad for America" as he told CNNs Howard Kurtz. Im embarrassed about whats going on as an American." The disruptions and coverage thereof distorted serious discussion he explained. Mark Shields said much the same on Fridays PBS NewsHour if with less excitation pointing out that these events were not good for the democratic process" and were a breakdown of civil debate.
There was no such hand-wringing over the decline of civil debate during say election 2004 when cadres of organized demonstrators carrying swastika-adorned pictures of George W. Bush routinely swarmed about and packed rallies. There was also that other breakdown of our media culture" that will dwarf all else as a cause for embarrassment the town-hall coverage included for the foreseeable future. That would be of course the undisguised worshipful reporting of the candidacy of Barack Obama.
That treatment or rather its memorylike the adulation of his great mass of votershas had its effect on this president and not all to the good. The election over the warming glow of those armies of supporters gone his capacity to tolerate criticism and dissent from his policies grows thinner apace. His lectures explaining his health-care proposals and why theyll be good for everybody are clearly not going down well with his national audience.
This would have to do with the fact that the real Barack Obamaproduct of the academic left social reformer with a program is now before that audience and what they hear in this lecture about one of the central concerns in their liveshis message freighted with generalitiesthey are not prepared to buy. They are not prepared to believe that our first most important concern now is health-care reform or all will go under.
The president has a problem. For despite a great election victory Mr. Obama it becomes ever clearer knows little about Americans. He knows the crowdshe is at home with those. He is a stranger to the countrys heart and character.
He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans dont take well for instance to bullying especially of the moralizing kind implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they dont know they want to go and being told its good for them.
Who would have believed that this politician celebrated above all for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answerthe same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign searching for their meaning.
It took this battle over health care to reveal the bloom coming off this rose but that was coming. It began with the spectacle of the president impelled to go abroad to apologize for his nationrepeatedly. It is not in the end the demonstrators in those town-hall meetings or the agitations of his political enemies that Mr. Obama should fear. It is the judgment of those Americans who have been sitting quietly in their homes listening to him.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journals editorial board.
