The most intelligent thing I've read so far about Obama's speech Tuesday night, the one that included not a single mention of climate change, comes from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. He's talking about the assumption that fear doesn't motivation people, only inspiration does.
But that strikes me as depressing evidence of how unlikely we are to succeed. I simply don't believe you could've passed health care if you couldn't have talked about covering the uninsured, and I don't think stimulus would've worked without the spur of the unemployed. It's not that people wanted to hear about either subject all day, but they got both problems on a visceral enough level that the action being taken at least made a sort of sense.
Making climate change visceral to the U.S. public is the challenge, to be sure.
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Huh? It already is visceral. Ask your random American on the street and he "knows in his gut" that AGW is bunk. He loves him his SUV and ain't nuthin' gonna come between him and his love.
Wait. What? Climate change?! I see how the oil spill should make the importance of environment visceral to a lot of people. And the issue of oil becoming harder to get. Especially to a lot of my neighbors in red states who have long assumed, rather stupidly, that it doesn't matter what man does because their god will take care of any messes. But climate change didn't cause the oil spill. And even if global warming weren't occurring, the oil spill still would be an environmental catastrophe.
You do know that every body in this country if they have no health insurance because they are too poor to have it already had, and had had for a long time, medical care, right? It's those who are uninsured because they owned a house and used their income to buy that house or to buy other stuff and therefore didn't have health insurance that you are probably referring to... The idea that the poor have no health insurance just isn't the way it is. It's those who have a small stake, work, and wish to have a financial future but who have no health insurance who find that when they need medical treatment they have to liquify and loose what they have...which ain't nice.
Doug: I know more than a few people who have no health insurance and can't get it because they're unemployed and broke. I also know people who were employed and (yup) bought houses when employed who are now unemployed and have no income. Should they sell their houses to buy health insurance and pay rent? In a depressed market where nice houses are sitting vacant for a year or two at a time (one right up the street from me, for instance)?