The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot/Talk/Nothin’ Straight
And I’m not talking about the Fab Five, either — but I do miss those guys.
Anyway, CATO sums up the “panic” in the White House over Obamacare’s failure to gain any traction with the public, based on a confidential memo from the Herndon Alliance. Now I haven’t read the whole memo, just the bits that CATO and Politico excerpted. But of those bits, here’s the one you won’t believe:
The presentation concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college educated women, and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly, many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House’s all-out communications effort.
This President wouldn’t leave my damn TV alone for a year — Obama took to the bully pulpit time and again to sell this monstrosity. He spent his first year in office trying to get this thing over on us, like a drunk high school boy working a bra, but with less finesse. Then there were the endless summits. The endless speeches (over 100). Pelosi and Reid’s primetime trickery for four solid months from Thanksgiving until they schemed its passage through in March, the legislative equivalent of a bought jury. And since then, all the talk about the “historic achievement,” with the mainstream media doing a propaganda job that would make the folks at Pravda blush.
And yet — did you read that line? — somehow, “many are unaware that the legislation has passed.” That’s not some “astonishing shortcoming.” That unadulterated incompetence, elevated to fine art. By “fine art,” I mean, the art of Christo: Mammoth, public, shameless, useless — and with any luck, quickly fleeting.
Very, very quickly fleeting.
UPDATE: Sometimes, the obvious explanation isn’t the first one you think of. But instead of incompetence, let’s instead suppose that all that sales effort went to waste simply because people stopped listening to their President, bare months into his term?
Is it that “many are unaware that the legislation has passed” or is it that they just don’t know what the hell is in “the legislation”?
You’re overlooking another obvious part of this. It never went away as a talking point. Indeed, the second it passed, the din got even louder. It became item number one for the republicans and the right blogsphere everywhere. The conversation continued as all the horrors of the fine print leaked out and indeed continue to leak out. And somewhere in all that noise and chatter the casual news consumers missed the fact that it passed.
Hey it happens.
Stephen:
I think those that don’t know the legislation has passed (however many of them there are) really aren’t a big problem for the Obamacrat machine… most of the people that are that out-of-touch with political realities are the kinds of people that go into the voting book and vote for every “D” they see.
The real worry for the Obamacrats are the ones that know that it passed, and are mad as… well, you know the rest of the line. If the poll numbers are accurate (and I’m a confirmed skeptic on polls), that number includes a lot of “independents” who voted for Mr. O.
So, if I was advising the Obamacrats, I wouldn’t be telling them to remind people that O-care passed. That seems to be the Party of the Donkey shooting themselves in the foot, a talent they seem to have perfected in the last couple of years.
Hand-foot-mouth disease comes to mind.
Speaking of which…
0bamacare will insure death panels:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7948878/US-breast-cancer-drug-decision-marks-start-of-death-panels.html
That’s roughly my thinking–those who don’t know it’s passed either vote Democratic robotically or they don’t vote at all. Those sorts don’t strike me as potential (R)’s.
Heh. You said it a lot more succinctly than I did. Sometimes I let my love of words get the better of me.
For some reason the Administration and the Democratic Leadership wants to pretend this is all the fault of Herr Bush and the Republican Party of No!. What they haven’t realized, and probably won’t until very close to the end of October is that it’s all about the Democrats and our Administration having become The Party of ‘We Don’t give a D**n about what most of our constituents think!’.
I guess we are all too so primitively schooled by our public education system that we must learn to accede to the wisdom of our privately-schooled leadership-class elites (/sarc).
And the Republicans should be VERY wary… We want to see real change in Washington DC, not just the Republican version of the same old stuff we’ve seen for the last 10 years or so. Until the Major parties learn the lessons, there will probably be huge swings in party power every few years. Or, we may finally see a new political party that can make a difference.
Among the millions of people who reach for the remote whenever the Loser in Chief appears are a lot of former supporters. Fat chance they show up in Nov.