2) Take the Show on the Road
In your campaign, you gathered a huge wave of power behind you by inspiring the American people. Fortunately, the health-care reform debate allows you to recapitulate that achievement.
During the campaign, the rhythm of the primaries allowed you to renew the energy and sense of vision of your leadership repeatedly: on the night of each primary, win or lose, there you were in an arena putting your rhetorical skills behind your vision of a better America, bringing those in the arena to their feet and evoking inspiration in viewers around the country.
Now it's time to get into the same kind of rhythm for the same kind of events: go around the country giving a series of inspiring speeches --selling the Obama Plan-- to be delivered in arenas around the country. These arenas should be filled with Americans of a representative sort who want to attend, so that their enthusiasm will be seen as representative of the people generally, not just a hand-picked bunch of supporters. (Disruption, however, should not be allowed.)
It is very important for Americans across the country to see, on their television sets, that the passion on this issue does not belong to the relative handful of right-wingnuts and industry-hired astroturfers who disrupted the town halls. The citizenry of this country, and its politicians, need to see a wave of enthusiastic support for your program by regular Americans in their thousands.
Let "Yes We Can!" be heard again in the land.
In order to maximize the television coverage of these events --and it is important to recapitulate not only the enthusiasm of the arenas but also the breadth of attention to your words that evoke that enthusiasm-- perhaps you could arrange for this series of events, in different parts of the country, to cover each a different one of the vital and weighty arguments of why reform is necessary and why your plan is the way to go.
That way, with each event having a different substantive content, the series will not be mere repetition but will have a unique and newsworthy message the media will have to cover.
These talks should be qualitatively different from the way you've mostly spoken to the American people about health care in recent months. Not necessarily different in basic ideas, but different in the character of the communication.
More fundamentally than this being a policy issue, it should be presented as a moral and spiritual issue. All the basic arguments in favor of health care reform can rightfully and meaningfully be presented in that way:
** Maintaining the solvency of our country --on all levels-- is a moral matter, for it involves basic responsibility to ourselves and our children;
** Extending compassion and care for our citizens is a spiritual and a moral matter, for it defines what we are as a nation, and who we are as a people, and it is in accordance with the deepest values of our spiritual traditions;
** Correcting the many injustices of the present system is a moral matter, for it is wrong to have a system in which individuals and families, in their most vulnerable times, have to go up against mighty corporate powers whose main concern is their profits;
** Getting this job done, and done right, is a matter of character, for America has tried and failed to get this accomplished since Truman, and it has been a long time since America demonstrated that it has the capacity to grab hold of such important problems and meet the challenge.
It is not just the words that need to be there to summon forth that moral and spiritual force you want to gather again behind you. It's also the "music."
In other words, these speeches should be delivered in a rhetorical style that moves people, that inspires them. Inspiration was surely part of your campaign-era speaking ability. A lot of that was about vision for our future, and that should surely be part of the "music" that you re-establish in your communication with the American people.
In your campaign, you gathered a huge wave of power behind you by inspiring the American people. Fortunately, the health-care reform debate allows you to recapitulate that achievement.
During the campaign, the rhythm of the primaries allowed you to renew the energy and sense of vision of your leadership repeatedly: on the night of each primary, win or lose, there you were in an arena putting your rhetorical skills behind your vision of a better America, bringing those in the arena to their feet and evoking inspiration in viewers around the country.
Now it's time to get into the same kind of rhythm for the same kind of events: go around the country giving a series of inspiring speeches --selling the Obama Plan-- to be delivered in arenas around the country. These arenas should be filled with Americans of a representative sort who want to attend, so that their enthusiasm will be seen as representative of the people generally, not just a hand-picked bunch of supporters. (Disruption, however, should not be allowed.)
Let "Yes We Can!" be heard again in the land.
In order to maximize the television coverage of these events --and it is important to recapitulate not only the enthusiasm of the arenas but also the breadth of attention to your words that evoke that enthusiasm-- perhaps you could arrange for this series of events, in different parts of the country, to cover each a different one of the vital and weighty arguments of why reform is necessary and why your plan is the way to go.
That way, with each event having a different substantive content, the series will not be mere repetition but will have a unique and newsworthy message the media will have to cover.
These talks should be qualitatively different from the way you've mostly spoken to the American people about health care in recent months. Not necessarily different in basic ideas, but different in the character of the communication.
More fundamentally than this being a policy issue, it should be presented as a moral and spiritual issue. All the basic arguments in favor of health care reform can rightfully and meaningfully be presented in that way:
** Maintaining the solvency of our country --on all levels-- is a moral matter, for it involves basic responsibility to ourselves and our children;
** Extending compassion and care for our citizens is a spiritual and a moral matter, for it defines what we are as a nation, and who we are as a people, and it is in accordance with the deepest values of our spiritual traditions;
** Correcting the many injustices of the present system is a moral matter, for it is wrong to have a system in which individuals and families, in their most vulnerable times, have to go up against mighty corporate powers whose main concern is their profits;
** Getting this job done, and done right, is a matter of character, for America has tried and failed to get this accomplished since Truman, and it has been a long time since America demonstrated that it has the capacity to grab hold of such important problems and meet the challenge.
It is not just the words that need to be there to summon forth that moral and spiritual force you want to gather again behind you. It's also the "music."
In other words, these speeches should be delivered in a rhetorical style that moves people, that inspires them. Inspiration was surely part of your campaign-era speaking ability. A lot of that was about vision for our future, and that should surely be part of the "music" that you re-establish in your communication with the American people.
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