We're not idiots, Mr Davis

I used to think that Lanny Davis was a relatively smart political operator, but his article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was mind-blowing in its silliness.

According to polls, fears about the Democrats' health-care proposal played a prominent role in Mr. Brown's victory yesterday. In the last several months, the minority congressional Republicans have dominated the message on health care—and stamped on the Democratic Party the perception that we stand for big government, higher taxes, and health insecurity when it comes to Medicare.

How is that possible? The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?

Oh, we heard it, Mr. Davis. But unlike your perceptions of the American public, we are not idiots. You promise to give us guaranteed health insurance with one hand, but we know full well, that the other hand will be extracting the price. And it's a rather big price. We know that should you get your way, we'd be facing: 1) vastly higher taxes, 2) less availability of care with longer lines, 3) slower adaptation of new and breakthrough medicine, 4) losing our freedom to choose the level and price of our insurance on our own (or negotiate our healthcare with our employers.) We know the game, and we don't want to play. We don't want to be told which insurance we can and can not have. We don't want to be denied medicine because some government bureaucrat decided that what we need isn't on the approved list.

We also have been around the block more times that we can count. The Democrats started ramping up their spending programs several generations ago. And over the years the American public has learned one thing above all else: regardless of how much the politicians say something will cost, the real cost will turn out to be many times greater. With massive debt already crippling our country, the American people know in our bones that we can't pile more trash on the heap.

"How can this happen?" Mr Davis? Simple, we aren't the dupes you take us for.

Davis has more priceless comedy later in his article too:

In 1996, Mr. Clinton was the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR... He did so by creating a new ideological hybrid for a still-progressive Democratic Party: balanced-budget fiscal conservatism, cultural moderation, and liberal social programs administered by a "lean and mean government." ...

Then, in 2008, Barack Obama added something extra: a commitment to a "new politics" that transcended the "red" versus "blue" partisan divide. He explained this concept clearly in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech and during his 2008 presidential campaign. It meant compromise, consensus and bipartisanship, even if that meant only incremental change.

Davis makes a simple mistake. He's equating giving speeches in favor of bridging the red/blue divide with actually wanting to bridge the divide. Again, the American people aren't dupes. Or, at least you can dupe them for a while during a campaign, but once you get elected and completely overturn all of your brilliant rhetoric in favor of one sided, so blue it's ultraviolet, politics and policies, people's eyes have a tendency to open wide. In a sense, we are all Missourians, once you're in office, all the talk in the world doesn't matter so much as what you Show Me. Obama has showed us all that he doesn't really give a damn about bridging the divide between Cambridge and the bitter clingers, the Tea Partyers and gourmet chai drinkers, he wants to drive this country as far to the left as he can.

Sorry, Mr. Davis, the American people--always a center-right public--aren't buying what your selling.