I’m stunned by the amateur approach of Obama and his White House team to the PR aspects of health care insurance reform. While the opponents of the plan have done a masterful job of ginning up opposition to change, the White House has been caught napping and clueless.
I kept waiting to see if the Obama team was just waiting for the right time to roll out its effort, but now that the news is that the White House is “firing back” at critics, it’s obvious that they went to Plan B because they didn’t have a Plan A.
Where, for example, is the Mile High Stadium version of a health care reform rally?
Where are the heart-rending stories from ordinary citizens who will be helped by the plan?
Where is the demonization of the huge interests who are opposed to reform?
Where is the one-pager that describes to the average citizen what the benefits of the plan are?
Why is it that even I, an informed and highly educated citizen, can’t tell you a thing about what’s in it for me and my family?
This last point is the reason why these wingnut shouters at Congressional town hall meetings are having so much success — because the absence of a common understand of “what’s in it for me” has created a vacuum and an opportunity to create a fear of “what I have to lose.”
It’s too late now to fundamentally change the game. The best the Obama people and supporters of reform can hope for is that the screamers will hit the limit of their effectiveness and that the Democratic majorities in Congress will deliver an acceptable reform bill.
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