"A Change Is Gonna Come", Or is It?

An insightful diary posted on Firedoglake caught my attention early this morning. After a night’s sleep and the “pleasure” of watching more backtracking from the administration on the Sunday morning talk circuit, I feel even more strongly that this post by Marta Evry crystallizes the major issues of concern to many Democrats.

For five months, I gave up my "day job" as a film editor on theatrical films and network dramas to work on the campaign. Now, about that job. Essentially, it can be boiled down to this: I manipulate sound, images and language to create the desired emotional response in a viewer. Give me a couple of close ups of people's faces, a wide shot, an explosion and the right piece of music and I can make you angry, sad, or laugh - depending on how I manipulate those elements.

My point is this: Republicans understand - have always understood - this very, very well. They'll take a set of facts and figures, find the emotional truth inside all that information they want to push and go for it.

Presto-chango, end of life counseling becomes "death panels," reducing fraud and inefficiencies in Medicare become "pulling the plug on grandma."

One of the great joys for me in working on the Obama campaign was being involved with people who understood this concept very, very well. Although I had no part in the messaging of the campaign myself, I watched with great appreciation how the campaign tapped into the emotions of its volunteers. They took a demoralized activist base beaten down by 8 years of quasi-fascist rule and lifted us up with three simple words and one simple concept - "Respect, empower, and include" and "CHANGE."

Respect, empower, include, and change. Those four words aptly describe the theme that candidate Obama embraced. He would be a President that would respect opposing views, empower the citizenry, include those who have been left out, and most importantly change the culture of entrenched corporate power which dominates both parties in Washington. After seven and one half months, however, it appears that the candidate Obama who vowed to fight hard against the powerful corporate lobbies, did not move to Washington.

First it is impossible to respect an opponent who is not rational. The Republican Party in Washington, as it exists today is made up almost exclusively of people who hate government. They have no desire to improve government; they only come to destroy it. So rather than offering any plan of their own, they simply shoot down the President’s as being too extreme. Of course, when the President acquiesces and makes a plan that is already too moderate, even more so, Republicans still scream Socialism.

In order to empower you must include. Again that was something that candidate Obama seemed to understand, but President Obama has yet to grasp. Instead of utilizing the millions of e-mail addresses that the campaign gathered to mobilize and involve citizens in the fight for health care reform. E-mails taking a strong message to the public, motivating active support, encouraging letters and phone calls to congress have been lacking. When interest groups like Moveon.org, who were instrumental in the election launch an ad campaign against recalcitrant Democrats, President Obama tells them to back off. Instead of reinforcing the difficulty of the battle ahead against the moneyed insurance and pharmaceutical lobby, there are reports of back door deals with pharmaceutical companies.

That does not sound like "Change we can believe in". It sounds more like same old politics. All of this gets back to the point Ms. Every made in her closing argument:

That is what the fight over the public option is all about - it is not about policy. It's a proxy for the implied contract we entered into when we helped get Obama elected. We expected Change, we expected to be respected, empowered and included, we expected him to fight, and we expected to join him in that fight.

Yes, this is about health care reform, but really it is about the whole promise of “change” which was the Obama campaign. We thought we were ordering change when we cast that vote for candidate Obama. We were promised a change from the politics of the past. If President Obama cannot start to deliver on that promise, there will be a large number of demoralized and disgusted voters who will be very difficult for President Obama to ever reach again.