from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 16 Aug 2009 08:05 PM PDT

With Obama's allies sounding the retreat on the public option,
ObamaCare has taken a decisive blow. And Obama has taken his first major
political defeat. What is particularly extraordinary is that he has
suffered this defeat, despite interrupted media sycophancy delivering
programming that reflected every single White House talking point. From
smearing Republicans as in the pockets of the insurance industry and Town
Hall protesters as extremist racists, to treating ObamaCare as the only
reasonable thing that only lunatics would resist-- the media delivered on
its end of the propaganda. And yet minds kept getting changed in the other
direction.

So how did it happen?

We can turn for starters to
the man whose shadow Obama has occasionally sought to fill (when he isn't
filling the shadows of FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan and the Messiah of all
Mankind), Abraham Lincoln. It was Honest Abe who said, "You can fool some
of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the
time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." With
Obamacare, Barry Hussein discovered that he couldn't fool all of the
people, all of the time after all.

The media's great faith in
itself notwithstanding, most Americans don't put very much faith in what
they hear on the news. The media's propaganda works best when it's going
the way they want to go. For years Americans tuned out the media's Bush
bashing, except when they came to feel frustrated about the war and the
economy. This resulted in the media taking credit for something that
didn't have nearly as much to do with them, as they would like to believe.
The media may pride themselves on playing the liberal Iago to the flyover
country Othello, but the rumors and lies they feed only work when Othello
is already suspicious of Desdemona.

This time around the American
public sided with critics of ObamaCare and with the Town Hall protesters,
despite the media's White House orchestrated smear campaigns against them,
because the American public was itself suspicious of ObamaCare and found
some of the issues that were raised to be valid. The hurt and baffled
stories in the press only demonstrate the cluelessness of the liberal
bi-coastal elites and their inability to understand that they are not
actually in control of the American people.

And what goes for the
media, goes double for the Obama Administration, who's commitment to style
over substance, and image over reality, blinded it to the fact that many
of those mainstream Americans who did vote for Obama, were giving him a
chance, rather than an open ended mandate. With ObamaCare, Barry trotted
out a high flying media campaign and did what he's always done, put on a
show. But the show never went on as scheduled because ordinary Americans,
including those who voted for him, had actual questions they wanted
answered.

If up till now Obama had successfully played the slick
car salesman, waving banners, hiding behind grand but hollow phrases, and
showing off how shiny the car was-- with ObamaCare, the customers for the
first time began asking questions about what's under the hood. And that's
not something Obama is equipped to answer in anything but vague
generalities. Obama has shown himself to be a Master of Distractions, but
with all the money that Americans had spent on Stimulus packages and the
automaker bailouts, for the first time the American taxpayer put his hand
on his wallet and asked, "So tell me pal, how much is all of this gonna
cost me."

But public skepticism alone may not have been enough, the
key ingredient was that for the first time in his career, Obama ran into
some serious opposition that he couldn't gladhandle his way out of. Not
opposition from the Republican party, which has become too fixated on
finding new ways to lose gracefully, while trying not to piss off its base
too much. But from a growing grass roots movement.

One of the fatal
mistakes of the Obama Administration was its attempt to demonize and
suppress that grass roots movement. The first phase of the mistake got the
media to focus on the protesters, by smearing them as extremists, violent
disruptors and all around dangerous folk. This was par for the course in
the Obama camp, but it put a vocal protest movement on television, and as
Obama should have known from his own radical roots, once you put people on
television, even in order to smear them, their message can't help but be
heard.

Obama's people understood their mistake a little too late,
and released a followup meme which blasted the media for focusing on the
protesters, a message delivered from the top down from Obama himself, to
his media stooges like Jon Stewart. But it was too little, too late. The
damage had been done.

Obama's people had sought to frame the
ObamaCare debate as being between the reasonable health care reform
advocates, and the ugly extremists protesting it. Marginalizing them was
meant to marginalize criticism of ObamaCare itself, which would make
mainstream conservatives distance themselves from it. It was a classic
Alinsky tactic, but this time it backfired badly, even before Obama's
bussed in SIEU thugs began beating people up at Town Halls.

From
the start Obama's people had sought to create the image of a Republican
party split between a helpless leadership and an extremist base. It was
the tactic used in targeting Rush Limbaugh with the meme that he was the
real head of the Republican party. It was the tactic used in giving
airtime to the likes of Meghan McCain. And the Republican party appeared
to be living up to it.

Michael Steele and all too many GOP Senators seemed willing to
provide the helpless leadership side of the ticket, as recently as the
Sotomayor debacle. No wonder then that the Obama Administration was caught
flatfooted by the opposition they faced at Town Halls when it came time to
try and sell ObamaCare to the American public.

Liberals have never
taken seriously the idea that anyone but them is capable of fielding a
grass roots movement, which is why the initial smear campaigns against the
Town Hall critics claimed that they were astroturfed Republican operatives
in Brooks Brothers suits, apparently the same ones who kept that nice Mr.
Gore from becoming President and saving all the Polar Bears.

When
this quickly exposed itself as ludricious nonsense, the panicked left
dragged out the race card, condemning critics as racists and neo-nazis.
Newspapers described a photoshopped image of Obama as the Joker with the
tagline 'Socialism', as racist, a claim that never made sense to anyone.
Not even them. Pelosi conjured up Swastika bearing mobs descending on Town
Halls.

Not only did these tactics fail, but they backfired badly.
The American public wanted a serious discussion of health care reform.
Instead what they got was FUD that had absolutely nothing to do with the
issue. The American public, on either side of the aisle, had very little
interest in hearing about the paranoid ravings of the Democratic party.
They wanted answers. What they got were already unpopular Senators and
Congressmen trying to rush people through the process, yelling at
constituents and admitting they had no idea what the legislation actually
said.

The game was over even before the SIEU purple mobs got on the
scene. The relative passivity of the Republican leadership had suckered
the Obama Administration into believing they were facing a cakewalk. It
was seemingly obvious that the same inept Republican leadership that had
let the Chrysler, GM nationalizations and the Sotomayor nomination slide
by, could not seriously challenge them on an issue that they were certain
had such broad appeal.

But the defanged Republican leadership had
opened the way for the grass roots to play a larger role than ever.
Congress' falling ratings had made many representatives nervous about
going into an election, and the split between conservative and liberal
Democrats did not help matters. Obama had thrown the ball to congress,
forgetting that congress had been unpopular for a while. What emerged was
a tremendous disaster.

The Republican party may have been paralyzed
at the top, but Town Hall protesters demonstrated that its ideas were
quite vital, active and alive. The public was faced with the sight of
already unpopular politicians being confronted by people demanding
answers. And since they wanted answers too, the entire situation pushed
them to do the research better. The internet had made a media monopoly of
limited use, which allowed people to bypass the press in many cases, and
allowed anyone interested to read contrary opinions very easily.

The resulting outcome demonstrated that while the Democratic party
may be stronger than the Republican party, the grass roots of people who
are suspicious of big government may be stronger than either one. The war
is not over, but Obama has suffered a series crisis of both image and
legislation, as shifting poll numbers quickly convinced him to retreat.
Like Clinton's own health care defeat, this shows a sign of weakness, and
one that should embolden congressional Republicans who until now have been
far too inept at seizing opportunities, particularly in comparison to
party figures such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, who do
not even hold any actual public office at the moment.

Obama meanwhile has been shown an extremely painful
lesson about the limits of his cult of personality. Whether or not he has
actually learned that lesson is something we have yet to see. But what is
truly important is that the Republican party learn the lesson that its
strength lies not in media consultants or grappling for some middle
ground, but by confronting, challenging, risking and daring. The public
does not reward political complacency for very long. To be average in
politics, all you need to do is warm a chair and return some political
favors. To triumph you must dare to do great things.

The
protesters who went out to confront their politicians, did so against the
odds. No one in Washington D.C. thought they would succeed or even make an
impact. And once again Washington D.C. on both sides of the aisle, proved
to be wrong. Lincoln's timeless words represent a warning to would be
monarchs and messiahs in American politics, that they cannot long succeed
in controlling an entire nation with their lies. Americans may given in to
the political circus of elections, but eventually the tents are rolled up,
the elephants lie down to sleep and the public demands more than
entertainment, they demand results.

The focus on specific issues,
on questioning actual legislation and being in tune with the public's own
questions helped bring us here. The Town Hall protesters became the
standardbearers for growing American skepticism toward the Obama
administration. Harnessing that skepticism through grass roots movements
marks the path toward victory.