How the Battle of ObamaCare Was Won

With Obama's allies sounding the retreat on the public option, ObamaCare has taken a decisive blow. And Obama has taken his first major political defeat. What is particularly extraordinary is that he has suffered this defeat, despite interrupted media sycophancy delivering programming that reflected every single White House talking point.

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From smearing Republicans as in the pockets of the insurance industry and Town Hall protesters as extremist racists, to treating ObamaCare as the only reasonable thing that only lunatics would resist-- the media delivered on its end of the propaganda. And yet minds kept getting changed in the other direction. So how did it happen? We can turn for starters to the man whose shadow Obama has occasionally sought to fill (when he isn't filling the shadows of FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan and the Messiah of all Mankind), Abraham Lincoln. It was Honest Abe who said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." With Obamacare, Barry Hussein discovered that he couldn't fool all of the people, all of the time after all. The media's great faith in itself notwithstanding, most Americans don't put very much faith in what they hear on the news. The media's propaganda works best when it's going the way they want to go. For years Americans tuned out the media's Bush bashing, except when they came to feel frustrated about the war and the economy. This resulted in the media taking credit for something that didn't have nearly as much to do with them, as they would like to believe. The media may pride themselves on playing the liberal Iago to the flyover country Othello, but the rumors and lies they feed only work when Othello is already suspicious of Desdemona. This time around the American public sided with critics of ObamaCare and with the Town Hall protesters, despite the media's White House orchestrated smear campaigns against them, because the American public was itself suspicious of ObamaCare and found some of the issues that were raised to be valid. The hurt and baffled stories in the press only demonstrate the cluelessness of the liberal bi-coastal elites and their inability to understand that they are not actually in control of the American people. And what goes for the media, goes double for the Obama Administration, who's commitment to style over substance, and image over reality, blinded it to the fact that many of those mainstream Americans who did vote for Obama, were giving him a chance, rather than an open ended mandate. With ObamaCare, Barry trotted out a high flying media campaign and did what he's always done, put on a show. But the show never went on as scheduled because ordinary Americans, including those who voted for him, had actual questions they wanted answered. If up till now Obama had successfully played the slick car salesman, waving banners, hiding behind grand but hollow phrases, and showing off how shiny the car was-- with ObamaCare, the customers for the first time began asking questions about what's under the hood. And that's not something Obama is equipped to answer in anything but vague generalities. Obama has shown himself to be a Master of Distractions, but with all the money that Americans had spent on Stimulus packages and the automaker bailouts, for the first time the American taxpayer put his hand on his wallet and asked, "So tell me pal, how much is all of this gonna cost me." But public skepticism alone may not have been enough, the key ingredient was that for the first time in his career, Obama ran into some serious opposition that he couldn't gladhandle his way out of. Not opposition from the Republican party, which has become too fixated on finding new ways to lose gracefully, while trying not to piss off its base too much. But from a growing grass roots movement. One of the fatal mistakes of the Obama Administration was its attempt to demonize and suppress that grass roots movement. The first phase of the mistake got the media to focus on the protesters, by smearing them as extremists, violent disruptors and all around dangerous folk. This was par for the course in the Obama camp, but it put a vocal protest movement on television, and as Obama should have known from his own radical roots, once you put people on television, even in order to smear them, their message can't help but be heard. Obama's people understood their mistake a little too late, and released a followup meme which blasted the media for focusing on the protesters, a message delivered from the top down from Obama himself, to his media stooges like Jon Stewart. But it was too little, too late. The damage had been done. Obama's people had sought to frame the ObamaCare debate as being between the reasonable health care reform advocates, and the ugly extremists protesting it. Marginalizing them was meant to marginalize criticism of ObamaCare itself, which would make mainstream conservatives distance themselves from it. It was a classic Alinsky tactic, but this time it backfired badly, even before Obama's bussed in SIEU thugs began beating people up at Town Halls. From the start Obama's people had sought to create the image of a Republican party split between a helpless leadership and an extremist base. It was the tactic used in targeting Rush Limbaugh with the meme that he was the real head of the Republican party. It was the tactic used in giving airtime to the likes of Meghan McCain. And the Republican party appeared to be living up to it. Michael Steele and all too many GOP Senators seemed willing to provide the helpless leadership side of the ticket, as recently as the Sotomayor debacle. No wonder then that the Obama Administration was caught flatfooted by the opposition they faced at Town Halls when it came time to try and sell ObamaCare to the American public. Liberals have never taken seriously the idea that anyone but them is capable of fielding a grass roots movement, which is why the initial smear campaigns against the Town Hall critics claimed that they were astroturfed Republican operatives in Brooks Brothers suits, apparently the same ones who kept that nice Mr. Gore from becoming President and saving all the Polar Bears. When this quickly exposed itself as ludricious nonsense, the panicked left dragged out the race card, condemning critics as racists and neo-nazis. Newspapers described a photoshopped image of Obama as the Joker with the tagline 'Socialism', as racist, a claim that never made sense to anyone. Not even them. Pelosi conjured up Swastika bearing mobs descending on Town Halls. Not only did these tactics fail, but they backfired badly. The American public wanted a serious discussion of health care reform. Instead what they got was FUD that had absolutely nothing to do with the issue. The American public, on either side of the aisle, had very little interest in hearing about the paranoid ravings of the Democratic party. They wanted answers. What they got were already unpopular Senators and Congressmen trying to rush people through the process, yelling at constituents and admitting they had no idea what the legislation actually said. The game was over even before the SIEU purple mobs got on the scene. The relative passivity of the Republican leadership had suckered the Obama Administration into believing they were facing a cakewalk. It was seemingly obvious that the same inept Republican leadership that had let the Chrysler, GM nationalizations and the Sotomayor nomination slide by, could not seriously challenge them on an issue that they were certain had such broad appeal. But the defanged Republican leadership had opened the way for the grass roots to play a larger role than ever. Congress' falling ratings had made many representatives nervous about going into an election, and the split between conservative and liberal Democrats did not help matters. Obama had thrown the ball to congress, forgetting that congress had been unpopular for a while. What emerged was a tremendous disaster. The Republican party may have been paralyzed at the top, but Town Hall protesters demonstrated that its ideas were quite vital, active and alive. The public was faced with the sight of already unpopular politicians being confronted by people demanding answers. And since they wanted answers too, the entire situation pushed them to do the research better. The internet had made a media monopoly of limited use, which allowed people to bypass the press in many cases, and allowed anyone interested to read contrary opinions very easily. The resulting outcome demonstrated that while the Democratic party may be stronger than the Republican party, the grass roots of people who are suspicious of big government may be stronger than either one. The war is not over, but Obama has suffered a series crisis of both image and legislation, as shifting poll numbers quickly convinced him to retreat. Like Clinton's own health care defeat, this shows a sign of weakness, and one that should embolden congressional Republicans who until now have been far too inept at seizing opportunities, particularly in comparison to party figures such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, who do not even hold any actual public office at the moment. Obama meanwhile has been shown an extremely painful lesson about the limits of his cult of personality. Whether or not he has actually learned that lesson is something we have yet to see. But what is truly important is that the Republican party learn the lesson that its strength lies not in media consultants or grappling for some middle ground, but by confronting, challenging, risking and daring. The public does not reward political complacency for very long. To be average in politics, all you need to do is warm a chair and return some political favors. To triumph you must dare to do great things. The protesters who went out to confront their politicians, did so against the odds. No one in Washington D.C. thought they would succeed or even make an impact. And once again Washington D.C. on both sides of the aisle, proved to be wrong. Lincoln's timeless words represent a warning to would be monarchs and messiahs in American politics, that they cannot long succeed in controlling an entire nation with their lies. Americans may given in to the political circus of elections, but eventually the tents are rolled up, the elephants lie down to sleep and the public demands more than entertainment, they demand results. The focus on specific issues, on questioning actual legislation and being in tune with the public's own questions helped bring us here. The Town Hall protesters became the standardbearers for growing American skepticism toward the Obama administration. Harnessing that skepticism through grass roots movements marks the path toward victory.