The Ignorant American People Ploy

If the desparate progressives, liberals and moderates -- in other words, the partisans who are pushing for healthcare reform at any cost, even if the reform is worse than the status quo -- are to be believed, then the American public, which opposes the healthcare reform being pushed at this time, are ignorant followers of special interests who want to destroy healthcare reform -- they, the ignorant public, don't really understand the issues, they are merely confused and frightened by all the negative opposition from organized efforts on the right.

If this is the Democrats' true opinion regarding the American public, then one wonders where it comes from. When you stop to think about the diversity in America, it's a much different picture than the reductionist version on the left which depicts the American people as yahoos. Among the American people are engineers, educators, business executives, small business owners, scientists, lawyers, doctors, computer programers, designers, architects, psychologists, builders, pilots, physicists, artists, writers, as well as plumbers, laborers, carpenters, retail salespeople, clerks and myriad other occupations. These people have varying degrees of political understanding, but many of the occupations require much more intelligence than what is required to be a politician, or a political pundit.

They are not a mass of quivering dolts who are led by rightwing organizations, or confused and frightened by all the "sophisticated" manuevering of the elite political class (what a joke!). There are many intelligent, informed people across the nation, men and women with more intellectual power than that possessed by a Reid, Pelosi, Frank or Specter. Even the average mechanic or hairdresser may be politically informed far more than the patronizing politician can imagine, since the politicians have no way of knowing how informed or uninformed people might be. I'm sure there are lots of people who have no idea what's going on with healthcare, but most likely they know someone who is informed and will get the knowledge they need once the issue inspires their interest.

The point is that all across this nation are people who are well-informed about the healthcare reform debate and they are talking to other people, and, granted, organizations are talking about it to their members - conversations are taking place everywhere, in many different ways, including the internet. People are smart enough to figure all this out -- it's just that the ignorant political class doesn't like the response, so far.

Just look around at all the diversity in your community -- listen to the conversations -- it's much different than the politicians depict -- and, that's where the power ultimately resides, not in the little groups of six monkeys*, and such.

*They're not really monkeys, they just act that way.