Where Democrats have President Obama, principles, and a new argument about consumer protections, Republicans have an enthusiastic, self-contained base that is ready to work to defeat Obama’s signature initiative. (On some level, this isn’t _really_ about health care: it’s about anxiety and anger at government, and at the Obama administration.) Democratic members are left to sell a series of principles that are popular, but which have been obscured by the focus on Washington sausage making.
[….]
The president, the vice president and the Cabinet will be out in force to make arguments, some of them good arguments, in favor of the need for health insurance reform. The goal of the opposition — of Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity — isn’t to change minds; their activists know what they believe already: it’s to make noise. Making noise scares members of Congress. And Democrats are vulnerable to panics.
That said, if the only people who show up at the constituent meetings are angry, talking-point-spewing ideological opponents of the president, then maybe the maybe the effect of the meetings will attenuate.
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