Not the Color of His Skin, But the Cost of His Plans

One thing is for certain, healthcare reform is on everybody’s mind and people are hopping mad about it. There are Americans who are angry at those who dare oppose the president’s government health plan and Americans who are angry at the mere idea of it and its cost.

It seems every person I talk to this week has something to say about the town hall meetings being held across the country. Earlier this week, a black female friend of mine, who is an attorney in New York emphatically said “if Obama wasn’t black, people wouldn’t be turning out in such numbers to protest at these town hall meetings.” She added that she felt people’s hostility toward healthcare reform was race-based pure and simple, adding “most of the people attending these things are old white people.” But many of these old white people, Democrat and Republican alike, came out in droves to vote for Obama.

I was surprised and told her I disagreed with her assessment that people’s anger over healthcare was fueled by their hatred for Obama as a black man. Notwithstanding that there are many people out there who don’t like the fact we have a black president and never will, I told her I didn’t think that’s where the anger is coming from. I explained that I believed people are waking to the reality of how much a government healthcare plan will cost and don’t like the idea or don't understand why the president is pushing it when many don’t have jobs, are losing homes or can barely make ends meet. People want to see their lives improve and the economy get better before the president talks about spending $1 trillion dollars on Medicare.

As we talked she admitted she doesn’t understand all the different healthcare plans out there and would like someone to explain to once and for all what healthcare reform means. She said that she gets tired of hearing the same old slogan that the current healthcare system is going to bankrupt us and wants the president to explain “how healthcare is going to bankrupt the country?”

This is exactly why the angry crowds are storming town hall meetings: People are tired of the same old refrain and want a simple explanation of why we need healthcare reform and why we need it now! But they’re not getting it. For Speaker Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod to suggest that the disgruntled Americans we see at the meetings don’t reflect the broader mood of the country is insulting to the American people. Americans are waking up from their love-affair with the nation’s first black president and are finally scrutinizing his plans, asking for “the proof in the pudding” beneath the oratory offensive.

Dorothy Rabinowitz in a recent Wall Street Journal article summed up the disconnect between this administration and the will of the American people:

The president has a problem... He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character. He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on healthcare for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them.

Over and over again, the president, administration officials and members of Congress keep telling the American people they know what’s best for them and say it in a patronizing, "I’m smarter than you", way. I told my friend that’s part of the problem: the "smarter than you" message is bringing out the anger in the crowds not the president’s skin color. Moreover, I told her I thought the administration would be more successful if it worked fixing the current problems, including fraud, with Medicare and Medicaid before trying to add another government run healthcare problem in the mix. (The next day, I saw a photo on the front page of the Washington Post of a woman, who attended the president’s New Hampshire town hall, holding a sign “Fix Old, No New.”

My friend agreed with me and said she thinks by the time we get old, neither of us knows what will be left of Medicare. But toward the end of our conversation, she passionately said “I still don’t understand all this anger. It took Bush eight years to get us into this mess and Obama’s only been on the job six months or so.”  I explained that I thought the healthcare debate with its huge price tag, added to the country’s expected $1.8 trillion debt this year, was the match that set off the fire in Americans’ bellies and compelled people to start speaking out.

Americans supported the president in his $800 billion stimulus package, his billions in bailout money to banks, GM and Chrysler and want to see some improvement in the country and their lives before more government money is thrown at something else. “But the feeling now is enough is enough,” I told her. There’s a lot of resentment brewing amongst Americans that big businesses have been helped and made richer but nothing’s improved for the regular guy.

My friend said the angry crowds scared her and she worried crazy radicals might take to violence at these town hall meetings. I told her I was actually heartened by seeing people across the country engaging in the political process and making their voices heard for a change. Isn’t that what democracy is all about? I think these town hall meetings are a sobering reminder to members of Congress that they are ultimately elected to be the stewards of the interests of their constituents, the American people, not the politics of their party.

Attempting to silence citizens by throwing them out of town hall meetings, not giving them a ticket to get in or ask a question, pre-selecting a friendly audience or setting up a White House email to encourage people to report fishy protestors all sounds very un-American. As a Virginian said in an August 12th Richmond Times Dispatch story, about a town hall meeting held by Rep. Tom Perriello: "Whether you think [health-care overhaul] is right or wrong, we can't afford it." This is perhaps what the rabble is reacting most to in the healthcare debate and it has nothing to do the color of our president but everything to do with the price tag of our deficit.