Give It Up For Harry Reid

Got to give it up for Harry Reid.  Holding all 60 Democrats - from Landrieu to Lincoln to Ben Nelson to Specter - on a cloture vote was HUGE, and reminiscent of LBJ's work passing civil rights bills in the late 50s and early 60s.  At least 3 of those Senators continue to voice opposition to an expanded role for government in health care.  Ironic on a number of levels, since all Senators receive excellent, government-run health care, and at least Nelson and Specter qualify for government-run Medicare.  


Nicholas Kristoff recently described how successful Medicare is:  . . . there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. 


But it's not Kristoff's column that prompted me to blog about Harry Reid.  Instead, it was a piece on NPR about Orson Welles.  


Welles became famous when on Halloween his radio play of 'War of the Worlds' convinced some people that our planet (the number ONE planet in our solar system) was actually under attack from aliens from outer space.   


I hadn't really thought about that incident much,  but did today in that it reminded me that we have always had some really stupid people in America. It may be too harsh to declare folks fooled by that radio play stupid, and for all I know the percentage of people fooled was probably very small.  


The WOTWs panic made me think that people now are much smarter, or at least more sophisticated, and that type of thing could never happen now. Then again, lots of people think Obama is a fascist and will give the country to the Muslims, etc.


So while we've always had stupid and unsophisticated people in America, I think one difference is back then that crowd was isolated and shunned. Today, they flock to Tea Bag Rallies and wait in line to buy Sarah Palin's book.  From time to time someone like Father Coughlin or the John Birch Society would become prominent, but they always lost. The New Deal and then the Great Society programs were passed by Congress and shaped American life over their opposition.


That crowd still loses, at least lost in 2006 and 2008 (and 1992, 1996 and got the fewest votes in 2000).  But with the explosion of media - cable television, the 24-hour news cycle, the internet (even blogs) - that crowd is not shunned, it's celebrated or at least used to fill up space and time on the air.  


Finally, I think the mainstream media used to actively shun racists, people who did not believe in evolution, etc. and exercised editorial authority by excluding crack pots.  But now the media is less interested in reporting hard truths or science, and instead feels that it's job is to report both sides even if one side is wrong or just plain nuts.  I wonder if activists who compare Obama to Hitler or want to  keep the government out of Medicare would have made it on the air 20 or 30 years ago.  


[To be fair to the mainstream media, very few allowed the birth certificate nut jobs any air time, for instance.]


It's a perfect storm of the 24-hour news cycle, the current version of inclusive American democracy, and Andy Warhol:  no matter how fringy or crazy or wrong, EVERY point of view gets it's 15 minutes of fame.


So kudos to Harry Reid for getting 60 votes to end the debate on health care despite the cacophony that passes for our democracy these days.