{"id":3329,"date":"2009-08-08T20:05:13","date_gmt":"2009-08-09T00:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3329"},"modified":"2009-08-09T20:07:59","modified_gmt":"2009-08-10T00:07:59","slug":"you-are-terrifying-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/you-are-terrifying-us\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Terrifying Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wall Street Journal<\/a> | Peggy Noonan | Aug. 7, 2009
\nVoters send a message to Washington, and get an ugly response.<\/em><\/p>\n

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There\u2019s a new tone in the debate, and it\u2019s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven\u2019t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.<\/p>\n

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it \u201cHillary\u2019s revenge.\u201d When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube. <\/p>\n

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins\u2014the stimulus, children\u2019s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn\u2019t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.<\/p>\n

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who\u2019ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.<\/p>\n

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he\u2019s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that\u2019s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, \u201cYou are terrifying us.\u201d <\/p>\n

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen\u2019s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren\u2019t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can\u2019t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss\u2014loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.<\/p>\n

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of \u201ccarrying swastikas and symbols like that.\u201d (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a \u201cno\u201d slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they\u2019re Americans. Some of them looked like they\u2019d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.<\/p>\n

Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC\u2019s \u201cHardball\u201d that people are \u201cstorming these town hall meetings,\u201d that they were \u201cwell dressed,\u201d that \u201cthis is all organized,\u201d \u201call planned,\u201d to \u201churt our president.\u201d Here she was projecting. For normal people, it\u2019s not all about Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

The Democratic National Committee chimed in with an incendiary Web video whose script reads, \u201cThe right wing extremist Republican base is back.\u201d DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse issued a statement that said the Republicans \u201care inciting angry mobs of . . . right wing extremists\u201d who are \u201cnot reflective of where the American people are.\u201d<\/p>\n

But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of \u201cdisinformation\u201d in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems \u201cfishy,\u201d you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight \u201cintentionally misleading\u201d information. <\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wall Street Journal | Peggy Noonan | Aug. 7, 2009 Voters send a message to Washington, and get an ugly response. We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There\u2019s a new tone in the debate, and it\u2019s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven\u2019t looked … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[117,36,72,18,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-incompetence","category-health-care","category-leftism","category-politics","category-totalitarian-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}