The New Old Guard

NY Times Magazine ^ | August 30, 2009 | MATT BAI

[neverdem]

For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself...

--snip--

But conservative theorists like Karl Rove used to say that time was on the side of Republicans where the elderly were concerned, because Depression-era memories would someday give way to a more complicated historical legacy — and perhaps, in this narrow respect, their grand predictions had some validity. If Obama has little of Bill Clinton’s...

--snip--

After all, a 70-year-old American today, born in 1939, probably has no personal memory of F.D.R., but he would have lived through the pain of disappearing manufacturing jobs and family farms, and the rapid deterioration of urban neighborhoods and schools, conditions unabated by government experiments in welfare and public housing. Wooed by Ronald Reagan during their prime earning years, these voters may not be nearly as sympathetic to Obama’s vision of activist government as Democrats might have assumed. For these new senior citizens, even the Social Security and Medicare on which they often rely may be viewed less as instruments of beneficent government than as a partial repayment for decades of taxes.

The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age...

[neverdem]

Organizing for America was supposed to have the names of 13 million who volunteered for Obama's election campaign, but it relies on prepositioned astroturf, i.e. union hacks and thugs bused in ahead of time, for the townhall meetings. The rats can't rely on the old anymore, the young are not reliable, and BHO has blown his credibility.

[fantom]

Yes , and imagine the Times commenting on the old and obsolete . Ha Ha . OOO whats that smell ?

[tgusa]

0 never had any credibility. He has always been a useful idiot for his puppeteers.

[frposty]

This guy’s off on a tangent. Polling will tell the politicians who’s for and who’s against. Polling’s what’s telling them now that Obamacare has probably ended its usefulness, or should we say that Dems need to find a way to stop Obamacare from doing more damage to the Obama mystique.

[leilani]

Polling’s what’s telling them now that Obamacare has probably ended its usefulness, or should we say that Dems need to find a way to stop Obamacare from doing more damage to the Obama mystique

Heh-heh. Gee, maybe now we should actually be trying to help the Dems extend the damage to themselves by encouraging them to keep their dream (and the public's nightmare) of ObamaCare alive, then.

Let's see, since their brilliant idea to rebrand the Public Option as the Chappaquiddick Option under its new name KennedyCare didn't quite seem to do the trick of resuscitating their DOA plan, maybe we could rechristen it yet again for them. Hmmmm. KevorkianCare has a nice ring, dontchathink?

Because Republicans are already campaigning for 2010 by promising to repeal ObamaCare if dems get away with steamrolling it through and it'd almost be a shame to lose a slam-dunk issue like this one with the voters. ;-)

[SnuffaBolshevik]

"they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force"....

I'm sure both of those guys support the dems.

[Grampa Dave]

Is Jayson Blair free lancing these days with different pen names?

[neverdem]

Is Jayson Blair free lancing these days with different pen names?

What makes you write that? IMHO, Matt Bai is one of their better writers.