Mad as Hatters

I was out of town Monday and Tuesday, and came back to find my RSS feed filled with exultation from National Review and denial from Daily Kos. The same people behind the Tea Party protests have now organized "ambushes" at Democratic town halls. Their goal is to disrupt any discussion of health care reform by shouting it down, and to dominate the news coverage of these events. I think the Tea Partiers are wrong and deeply misguided, but this is a genius political move.

August was meant to be the month when the Democrats went to work on wavering Blue Dogs and moderates and shored up support for a robust public option. Evidently their plan was to hold nice staid boring town hall meetings to let seniors complain about their health problems. The goal of these events was to get on the front page of small local papers, with no national coverage. Instead the Tea Partiers, with only a hundred or fewer people at each event, managed to storm the national stage with a message of popular opposition to health care reform. If this goes on unanswered, reform is dead.

How should the Democrats respond? Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Robert Gibbs are dismissing the protests, calling them "astroturfing." Which they are, in the sense that they are organized by corporate interests, and the protesters represent a much smaller proportion of the population than they claim. But these are real people, and they've been convinced to spend their free time disrupting public meetings. Labeling it astroturfing and plowing ahead is not an effective response. The town hall meetings will continue to be protested, and each individual Congressman that happens to will leave with a deep sense of fear about health care reform.

The only truly effective way is to counter the demonstrations is with even bigger demonstrations. Obama ran a brilliant ground game during the election. The Democrats need to activate their local volunteers and get-out-the-vote organizations. Get out pro-reform crowds that are bigger than the Tea Parties. Make sure everyone's carrying blue signs, so the cameras can tell whose side they're on. Move the events to city centers rather than suburbs, to make it easier for supporters to attend.

Then, just as the August recess is wrapping up, Obama should hold one or more massive rallies. He brought out a hundred thousand people out for a rally in St. Louis before the election. He could have done that in any major city in the country. Compare these pictures -- which side do you think has more support?





That kind of enormous rally would dominate the news for 3 days and would trump the small-scale Tea Party ambushes. It would cap the recess with a Democratic success story. News anchors would be not be talking about "health care reform stumbling," but about Obama's tremendous persuasive powers.

I know Obama's busy, but the success or failure of health care this year will spell the success or failure of his presidency. The reality is that winning an election is not enough -- there must be a constant campaign to actually get anything done once you make it into office.