>The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer
>health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it.
-I was going to say that all you had to do was insert the words -"government-run" in place of "single-payer" and support would drop by -20 points. But I decided to look at an actual poll instead, and by -god, my estimate was too low. -Those aren't awful numbers, and you could certainly work with them. -But don't get carried away with the inchoate populism/social -democracy of the American people.
A failure to equate enthusiasm for "government-run" with social democratic aspirations makes little sense. Americans have plenty of good evidence that government can be untrustworthy and corrupt, so opposition to "government-run" does not equate with rightwing views, just skepticism of the efficiency and fairness of government decisions.
The corporate rightwing has spent a lot of good dollars instilling that distrust and you sometimes think the incompetence of the Bush Administration in Iraq and in the Katrina response is designed to reinforce it.
But there is a reality that there is broad support for a fairer, more equitable health care system, for raising taxes on the wealthy, and for raising wages of those at the bottom. That's a pretty decent populist instinct to work with out there. The tough part is not convincing people of the end goal but that the policy promised won't end up as a clusterfuck (oh yeah, Medicare Part D, another GOP plot to demonstrate the incompetence of government.)
Nathan Newman