It's fascinating hanging out in the "bloggysphere" as I like to call it.
Nowhere else can I find such a concentration of informed people. People who have moved well beyond the News Junkie status and have become News Pushers. News Dealers. People who freebase refined, crystalline forms of information direct from the halls of DC or C-SPAN.
Before I bellied up to the DailyKos hookah, hourly stuffed with intoxicating conversation, lively debate, and hard core information, I thought I was getting the good stuff from CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Nuh uh.
No more. Now those sites and channels seem incredibly out of date or skin deep by the time they get around to the "news." And yet...that's where most Americans get their information.
In a roundabout way...this is why I think tonight's speech by the President is so crazy important.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine recently. He's got his PhD and a small business. A smart, and pretty informed guy. And by his voting record and his beliefs, he's a progressive. But his knowledge of the Public Option was shockingly sketchy. Same with another friend of mine with a family and a stable job and a general love of national news. Another fellow I spoke with recently is a doctor who was vaguely aware of it and vaguely supported it.
Here was this issue I'd been hearing about and reading about and going to rallies for for months, and these people had just a vague notion of it. They knew is was supposed to be good. But they weren't very clear on it. They didn't know what a Public Option really meant.
Most people very vaguely know about the public option, even though they personally feel they've been keeping up to date with the news. And that's not entirely their fault.
I'm going to climb way out on a limb here and suggest that the past couple months have illustrated why most nations have such a thing as a "head of state" and why Obama's speech tonight is going to be fairly important.
Congress has been all over the place. Obama's speech should serve to establish a more general, public understanding of what the heck is going on in health care reform.
In my opinion, congresspeople aren't really in a very good position to lead on a national level. On a national level they're more like high paid sheep and we've done our very best to herd them. To bark at their heels. To give a mighty shove when they stray off course. To wag in front of them a nice delicious herring or...side of beef...or whatever it is sheep eat. And we've done an amazing job of herding the good ones into the right pasture. But there's only so many of us, and there are others who are keenly obsessed with anti-herding.
So it won't hurt to have a louder bark on our side, and a harder bite. But more importantly, it won't hurt to have somebody who will bring MORE people to our side. The ones who don't sprinkle their corn flakes with powdered congressional deliberations and the news of the day.
That is why I believe this speech could very well tip the scales in our favor, depending on what's said. It's not just from the support of the president, but from the addition of millions of Americans who have been having a hard time cutting through all the noise and lies and talking heads.
And if Obama does side with the public option this evening...it's far from a reason to stand down. To think he's on it and we can relax. To think he's rallied the People. More like, if the broader base is made aware of the battle before us and the goals we're after, the generals in this drive to push against congress members have a much larger tool at their disposal, and greater leverage to shove congress where they need to be.
That's my hope anyway.
This speech, I believe, is very important. The bully pulpit is a powerful tool to activate Americans to action.