I was mildly but pleasantly surprised two days ago when I saw a video clip of Steny Hoyer, a man who has become an insufferable waffler regarding a public option within the health care legislation currently under consideration, declaring convincingly that he was, of course, supporting the public option. It seems Steny had a townhall meeting with voters during the August break, and it got quite raucous. Two separate articles cited the following incident as an example of the interaction between the lawmaker and his constituents:

The first questioner who challenged Hoyer directly, April Burke of Mechanicsville, Md., said her son and daughter in law both had lost their jobs and health insurance but were covered by the state.

"So why should I want to have the government get into my business?" she asked Hoyer.

The congressman said Burke’s family would benefit from the health care overhaul being proposed.

But she shouted back: "We want government out of our business now."

Others in the crowd wore T-shirts supporting the health overhaul that read "Our Lives Depend on it."

Anymore, I just shake my head and admit that I don’t get it. I just want to shout to that woman, "Fine. So you go and tell your son and his wife that the state is no longer going to be picking up the tab for their health care because you want the government out of your business!"

The thing is people are running scared, all het up in opposition to the “big, scary gov’mint” in an irrational manner, when we are the government. We are the “we” in “We, the people of the United States”. The Congress consists of people that we elected to represent us in a representative, democratic government. That means the government that many have allowed themselves to become driven to the point of frenzy over, includes ourselves, our friends, our relatives, our communities. There is no profit motive so representatives of government health care programs have no reason to throw blocks in your path as you try to work through the system when you’re at your weakest. Two representatives of the government will not be likely to enter your hospital room in the middle of the night when you’re all doped up to get you to sign a release stating they are not responsible for anything that happens to you while under their care. Under Democrats, there are laws against that sort of thing, after all.

In truth I have to question whether the right wing actually believes in democracy or representative government at all anymore. The way I see it, I hated a very large part of Bush Jr.’s term of office. His administration did many things I was adamantly opposed to, and I complained, and I wished the administration had been called to account for the infringements of our laws, invasion of our privacy, offenses against our civil rights and the civil rights of others in our names, etc., but I essentially waited patiently until my ideology was back in vogue. Once my party was back in the majority, and with a Constitutional Law professor at its head, I foolishly thought that we could roll back some of those civil rights abuses, curtail the invasions of our privacy, restore the balance among the three branches of government, make government more responsive, transparent, and accountable, and depoliticize the Attorney General’s Office and other Secretary level offices that were supposed to be apolitical. Those seem like righteous goals to me.

Unfortunately, after eight years of their misleadership, the opposition party apparently could not take being deposed. After eight years of attempting to turn the politics of personal destruction into his complete undoing, President Clinton left the oval office with his job approval ratings in the high sixties. By contrast, President George W. Bush’s incompetence as it became apparent after Katrina, and his administration’s abuse of power proved to be W’s own undoing and resulted in final approval ratings ranging from twenty two percent to the low thirty percents.

Not to be deterred by anything so crass as facts, the wild and wooly right wing has decided to once again invoke the politics of personal destruction against our newly elected President Obama. Now that our two parties are once again engaged in the health care two-step, a dance they do every few generations since Teddy Roosevelt’s time, the loyal opposition has determined that the only way they can derail Democrat’s ultimate success is to tell the most outrageous lies and toss around such obscene innuendo that it should make any decent forefathers cringe unless they, themselves, are used to dressing in hooded sheets. Birthers, deathers, and now tenthers, conspiracy theory is running wild. They’re all of a cloth and are becoming increasingly dangerous by acting out in ways that put others in jeopardy. They are bringing guns to Presidential town hall meetings. When asked why they brought the gun, they state it’s because they can. Really. It has nothing to do with the intimidation factor. Coercion does not enter into it regardless that some have openly stated that if the majority tries to impose its will on them, they will just take whatever they want.

In the meanwhile, we apparently have a President who is much too cerebral for this crowd. His soaring rhetoric is too far over their independent home-schooled heads. It’s time this President gave up his penchant for inspiration and became a leader. There’s way too much at stake for the country for the President to be allowed the luxury of one more professorial, looking down from the mountain type of speech that includes a willingness to cede one more inch of ground in this battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This enemy is a predator; if they sniff blood they will attack with a brutality the left will never know because it will be all over before we know what hit us. If this President goes out there Wednesday night and once more tries to tap dance to this two-step, he will dig his own political grave.

What I would say to President Obama if I had his attention is, “Mr. President, Steny Hoyer is for the public option. Nancy Pelosi says no bill will get out of the House without a public option. Even Roger Simon of Politico understands why the public option is so important! Only every single Republic Senator and a handful of Democratic Senators refuse to accept the concept that competition with and from a public agency can only enhance our chances of having any controls over the meteoric rise in health insurance premiums now and in the future. And the same can be said for prescription drug prices. I can only speculate, but it would seem that with the percentage of the public that wants that public option in the fifty five to seventy five percentile range depending on which poll you look at, the Senators in question, due to their seeming willingness to vote against the interests and will of their constituents, might have more cynical or perhaps conflicting interests? Yes, I am asking if they are trying to govern their financiers? If there are other reasons guiding the Democratic Senators refusal to come to terms within their own party, I think it is now incumbent on them to put forth their reasons publicly in a clear and concise manner so as to be judged by those that employ them. If they cannot or will not, I ask you, Mr. President, what is to be gained by ceding your own credibility and the good will of the many for the wealth of a few? One must, after all, look at themselves in the mirror at night and face their constituents in the mornings, mustn’t one?

Please tell the Senate, we said healthcare, not wealthcare. Tell the Senate to bring you a bill that includes a public option because the people want it. We can talk about the many ways we can do this later, including opening up Medicare or Medicaid or expanding SChip (some states have done something similar to this before) for everyone for a fee (premiums and copays), part of which may be subsidized for those who cannot afford even smaller premiums. But please, Mr. President, this time be emphatic in your support for a public option, lest your employers judge you as too crass and mindful only of protecting corporate interests first, voters interests after. Prove your detractors wrong; show us all that you can rise above pecuniary interests and actually do the will of the people, not the will of the powerful. Then we can all get on with our lives clear of conscience.