Townhalls: You Can't Fool All the People All the Time

The uproar at townhall meetings across the country are a living illustration of the old adage: you can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time. Dick Hughes in an opinion piece in today's Statesman Journal relates that he moderated a recent townhall for Rep. Schrader and concluded that the protests are genuine, not manufactured. www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20090820/COLUMN0704/908200317/1049/OPINION He hits the mother lode when he reports that many of the protesters simply don't trust their government.

The U.S. has always been a pragmatic country and its citizens have always been interested in getting things done efficiently and moving on with their lives. Rightly or wrongly, a majority of Americans believed that the country was broken at the end of President Bush's second term and they were ready for a change. Obama campaigned to the center and said he would be the great uniter, the one who fixed the broken machinery of government. But once in office, he has been anything but a pragmatic centrist. He has embarked on several of the most massive and untested programs ever devised (cap and trade, government health care) and cannot answer even basic questions about them as noted by Mr. Hughes in his column. Americans feel they have been bamboozled and they don't like it. They thought they were handing off their car to a mechanic who was going to fix it and get them on the road again and instead, he has taken the car and disposed of it, wants them to buy a whole new kind of vehicle (note: not a car) and won't tell them the price tag or anything else about it. Not surprisingly, they are not buying.

Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, had a great quote:

"The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character." online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342653428074782.html

I think the same is true of the whole Democratic Left. You can't fool all the people all the time, but they are so out of touch and arrogant that they are going to try.