All Politics is Local: What Healthcare Reformers Forgot

Some old adages survive because they
are true. No matter how you deliver the message - email,
snail mail, voice mail, text message or old-fashioned word-of-mouth
- if you forget to keep it simple and keep it local, your issue
or candidate will lose.

The right-wing went into high-wind
to scare seniors - a huge voting block - about healthcare
reform. And why not? All politics is local.

Tell a senior citizen you are going
to raise property taxes for new schools and it won't matter for even
a moment that the money is for their grandkids' education -
those seniors will vote no. Ask any number of local or state candidates
for office. Seniors, more than any other voting block, vote their
pocketbooks and vote their own immediate well-being.

Don't get me wrong, I love older
folks. In fact I am getting to be one. But many in the 65
years old -plus generation only hear that you are going to cut Medicare
spending - sounds like you are going to cut their health benefits
and what you spend on old people. Then they hear the scary, if
tainted cries of the crazies saying lots of other unfriendly-to-the-older-set
dribble and there you go ... a political revolution has begun.
It's hard enough for many to survive on the retirement they have,
so why wouldn't potential cuts be scary?

We'd be in healthcare reform heaven
right now if some brainchild in Congress or the administration had sold
it this way:

1. We're going to close
   the Medicare Part D, drug-benefit donut-hole;
2. We're going to end the
   Medicare Advantage subsidies paid to insurance companies;
3. We're going to preserve
   and protect Medicare benefits with no increase in premiums for seniors.

Nirvana. Political gold.
No matter what you put forward in the rest of the healthcare reform
story would have been safer and far less worrisome to the entire nation.
But you all scared the seniors, and now you are paying the price of inelegant and shifting messaging.

Political miscalculation isn't pretty
to watch. And it is unfortunately going to reinforce what seniors
were worried about in the first place - being lied to about health
reform and being maneuvered to their detriment. Perhaps because
we all watched a fairly brilliant campaign strategy pile on top of a
fairly arrogant Republican collapse in 2008, we expected some political
savvy to endure.

Maybe if you had been a little less
sure of yourselves as the new face of politics and political strategy,
maybe we'd be talking about truly getting everyone in this nation
covered instead of wondering how little we can see passed and still
call it reform at all. The American people deserve better -
seniors and all others.

You forgot politics 101, boys and girls. All politics are local, Tip O'Neill once said. Seniors wanted
to know seniors would be helped. Oops.