What the Rally for Sanity and Obama Have in Common and It's Not Politics

On the bus ride home to the Shenandoah Valley with some of the nearly two hundred people who made the hours-long journey to the Rally for Sanity, October 30, we were fired up. We were talking politics, the Democratic Party, The Tea Party, Republicans, and, well, passion. Mostly where the passion of two years ago went. Many of those on the bus had campaigned heartily and heavily for the president. Some were disappointed. But none were willing to switch party affiliation or fail to vote. Most were on the same page. Except for one thing. There seemed to be disagreement as to the question of "marketing," for want of a better word ,the message that the president had actually done a lot of what he had promised and why so many people were unable to grasp some of the historic legislation he had ushered in.

I agree with Obama's statement on the Daily Show recently that the health care bill, while far from perfect, shared many similarities with social security. It also shares the same similarities with early civil rights legislation: it's a great first step that can be built upon. And I also disagree with the many pundits (including Maureen Dowd in the New York Times) that putting so much energy into health care instead of jobs was a mistake. In fact, most people on my bus thought that Obama should have pushed through health care (and an even more comprehensive bill at that) in the early months of his administration, rather than trying to make nice with the Republicans. The argument came in the form of whether people knew exactly what was in the health care bill, or, for that matter, the financial legislation bill. And that is when the conversation turned to marketing and public relations, or, as more than one writer recently has put it, politics. Where is Obama's political savvy? People want to know. Why isn't he making sure the American public understands what he's done for us?

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