Kru-bear wonders how anyone can be swayed by anti-government arguments against the health care plan after the failure of capitalism. Never send an economist to do the job of a highly trained student of culture!

What's the problem? Why can't progressives seal the communication deal? The way the health care debate is going, it's as if in a municipal discussion about the best way to collect garbage one side said "pick it up on Thursdays" and the other said "I object to garbage pickup on principle." One side is arguing policy, the other is arguing ideology.

Let's do an extreme example! Say you're in Nazi Germany participating in a debate on the most efficient way to kill some Jewish people. Your friend the Nazi recommends firing ranges. You argue that shooting Jewish people is wrong. Your Nazi friend might be confused that you don't see the efficiency and cost effectiveness of his suggestion. He argues that you are an irrational and crazed nihilist who refuses to seriously consider solving the Jewish Problem. You do not agree that Jews are a problem. The debate is going nowhere and your Nazi friend will never win you over.

Taking the Hitler-Obama sign carriers seriously means considering that they might be experiencing a similarly bewildering scenario. To them, the health care plan is a victory for the Soviet Union while progressives are talking about what a great solution it is. They haven't even convinced these folks that there is a problem and here they are arguing solutions? How did this communication disaster happen?

The problem is that progressives (for convenience we can lump Obama and his folks in this category) have approached the health care debate the way they have miserably approached every other issue - they discuss the merits of plan A and continuously fail to adequately challenge the ideology that underpins the conservative position.

Conservatives have been creating and nurturing their narratives and myths since Reagan. Progressives have not engaged in large scale narrative-building since the Civil Rights era. So when conservatives brand health reform as a "socialist, big government giveaway" it plugs right into a neat logic that Americans have heard for the last 30 years: Obama will take your hard-earned dollars and use them to create a bumbling and wasteful giveaway to the lazy poors, blacks, and immigrants. At first it was welfare queens and now it's health care. Reading Martin Gilens' Why Americans Hate Welfare really provided a great deal of insight into the dynamics of the current debate.

If progressives had spent the last 30 years countering "government is evil," "taxes = theft," and "poors, blacks, and immigrants are lazy," they might not be facing such easy stirrings up of anti-government sentiments. Instead congresscritters have spent the last however long trying to prove that they're not with the terrorists, that they're tough on crime, and that they too are willing to screw the poor. Instead the spectacular market failure of ought eight has been swept under the rug a mere six months later and we're back to arguing whether the government can ever be useful.

I wish that Kru-Bear were right and that we could all just convince the Hitler-Obama people that the public option is the way to go with CBO projections and evidence of state-by-state monopolies and proof of success in other countries, but if in your world view those without insurance should just make more money and buy some and government intervention in the mythical free market of insurance is socialism, it just won't do.

Ideally Obama would make the easy case that we're all in this together (literally, in an insurance pool) and that insurance companies hate all of us (which they do). There are progressive narratives out there ready for the tapping in to. They're populist and anti-corporate. Unfortunately it's all uphill. Democrats and high profile liberals have failed to promote progressive narratives for the last thirty years and as a result have yielded worldview creation to conservatives. Let's spend the next thirty years reframing the debate and promoting progressive values.