From a living room in Kansas to a bagel shop in New York to an Alabama church, Democrats have started mobilizing support for President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans.

Suburban housewives and social workers mixed with Baptist ministers, college students, retirees and many others at grassroots gatherings over the weekend. Spurred by the Democratic National Committee’s burgeoning political machine dubbed "Organizing for America," thousands of such meetings had been planned for Friday through Monday. –Reuters

So I signed up for one of those Organizing for America (OFA; formerly Obama for America) health reform house parties in my neighborhood (Park Slope, Brooklyn) this past Saturday. Had no idea what to expect and was a little concerned that I might wind up as a confrontational defender of single payer in a room full of liberal but obedient public option proponents. Since I was alerted to the meeting by the single payer advocacy group Healthcare-NOW!, not OFA, I felt a bit like an infiltrator and I consciously psyched myself down with reminders that I was coming to listen and learn and, as needed, interject, but without trying to commandeer. I mean, Russ Mokhiber I’m not.

Held at the brownstone home of a two-physician family, the meeting had some 30 participants, almost all of them white and middle-aged (at 55, I was about the median age). The host was a VA-hospital-based internist who will be taking a job in the fall as a congressional health policy adviser in Washington.

He had us go around the room and quickly introduce ourselves and say why we had come. A high percentage of attendees were health professionals, including physicians, nurses, and mental health practitioners. At least two of the participants were attorneys (one bravely outing himself as a medical malpractice lawyer). A fair number had been Obama donors, some — I sensed — to a substantial degree.

As we went around the room, many of the professionals spoke of the devastation they had seen among uninsured patients in the city. Some people described personal insurance tragedies, such as the nurse whose husband suffered a devastating stroke and had crucial in-patient rehabilitation denied during a crucial window for recovery of function. One couple was there in part because their private insurance has worked well for them when their child needed a bone marrow transplant, and they wanted to make sure that whatever system emerges from the current round of reform works at least as well. One of the attorneys, a burly, gregarious 62-year-old man with type 2 diabetes, has no insurance and pays for all his care and medication out of pocket.

As the wave of introductions circled the room, people spoke in general and nonspecific terms about their interest in health care reform. Finally, one woman said she was there because she was furious that single payer had been taken off the table. After her came an audiologist and member of PNHP who also mentioned her support for single payer. Then came me, and I joked that I was glad that I didn’t need to be the first to raise the issue of single payer. But it seemed, for that moment, that we were the only three single-payer advocates in the room.

Following the agenda for the event, our host played a video with President Obama and an OFA official thanking us for our participation. We were told about the rapid timeline under which legislators were being pressed by the Obama Administration to draft legislation that adhered to his broad guiding principles of reform. Then we received forms with space for us to write down our individual tales of woe with the current health care system, which we were encouraged to discuss with those sitting next to us.

That’s when things started getting interesting.

The person-to-person discussions helped break the conversational ice in the room, but not entirely according to script. People started expressing confusion or frustration at the disconnect between our "assignment" and our roles as concerned citizens convened, supposedly, to provide input on a political and policy matter of high urgency. Were horror stories really the most important thing President Obama wanted 30 educated citizens, giving up their Saturday night, to contribute to the heated, ongoing debate?

I wouldn’t characterize what followed as a protest against the proceedings, certainly not against our host. But without any provocateurship on the part of the three initial single-payer declarees, the room rather rapidly and spontaneously transformed into something approaching a single-payer rally. The surface having been scratched, people’s inner Michael Moores came bursting forth.

Various individuals expressed confusion about Democratic proposals they’d learned of in the press, and other aspects of the current political machinations. I offered information on HR 676 and current Congressional deliberations and horse-trading, along with my own views on the varying degrees of inadequacy of public option proposals currently in play. The gregarious diabetic attorney adopted a Joan of Arc degree of zealotry, overoptimistically assessing the likelihood of Americans rising up en masse in 2009, hijacking the current capitulatory caravan, and forcing legislators to enact HR 676.

I can’t do full justice to the rapid and wide-ranging discussion, but I think it’s fair to say that many-to-most individuals in the room agreed that Democratic leaders’ failure to even consider the most objectively rational response to our health care financing problems amounted to something like betrayal.

In the thick of it, a wandering operative from OFA dropped in to see how things were going. I was heartened to hear from him that the content and tenor of our discussion pretty much matched that of other area OFA house parties he’d visited. He performed an admirable version of the Dance of Pragamatism, wherein single-payer advocates are praised and encouraged for their passion and clear-headedness while simultaneously discouraged from criticizing those actively compromising away their demands. I can’t say I was entirely unsympathetic, particularly when Gregarious Diabetic Attorney began clubbing the operative, rhetorically, about the head and neck.

I reminded GDA that most of the legislative sausage on health reform has already been ground, that his passion and advocacy were arriving rather late to the process, and that short of a million single-payer advocates marching on Washington this summer, we were not going to see single-payer enacted this year. OFA operative guy then said that not even a march like that would work, which ticked me off, proving that one man’s splash of pragmatic cold water is another man’s craven surrender.

OFA dude then tried to reassure us that single payer advocacy would help pull the discourse leftward to a more desirable version of public option legislation (with which I agree) and that Senator Kennedy supports single payer and his public option plan is meant to get us there by stealth (which I highly doubt). He also suggested that strong pockets of statewide single payer advocacy could help enact individual state single payer programs. I asked him whether that meant that OFA is officially endorsing Bernie Sanders’s S. 898 five-state single payer demonstration bill. He demurred. (Cool! I’ve always wanted to write "demurred.")

He also pointed out that in less Democratic, less liberal communities nationwide, not everyone was remotely sold on a strong public option, much less single payer. GDA asked how people could be that dumb, and OFA dude reminded him of all the Americans who thought invading Iraq was a brilliant idea. (God, I hate it when an establishment Democrat scores a valid point.)

Valiantly attempting to steer the evening back to the agenda, our host passed around a series of possible "service" activities our group could commit to for OFA’s planned Day of Service on June 27. These included blood drives, educational awareness activities to alert people to Obama’s expanded childhood insurance legislation, and several other events. Again, attendees expressed a disconnect between this call to service, however admirable, and the urgency of vigorous political stumping on behalf of the best — or at any rate, the least worst — health care reform legislation possible. Tentative commitment to service activities was expressed, with some added but unspecified advocacy thrown in, but it clearly left people with an empty feeling.

They left realizing the degree to which others share their frustration at the inadequacies not just of the status quo but of purported Democratic efforts to reshuffle it a bit. Decent work for a two-hour scratch at the American surface.