It is the visuals. The continuing photos and videos of oil streaming into the Gulf, pictures of globs of oil on the beaches and in the swamps and covering birds. These play nearly all the time, even when someone "important" is speaking. So there is no question that there is a problem at hand.
The 9/11 terrorist attack also provided shocking visuals, and those helped to mobilize the country. George Bush's popularity soared, and we sent troops off to kill and die in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons. But the visuals almost compelled action.
in contrast, the stock market crash and financial crisis did not produce good visuals, and so there have been no executives doing a perp walk, having to cough up money for the victims. All there was really for a huge, huge crisis were frequent shots of "house for sale" signs.
The health care crisis didn't produce good visuals either. You just can't get footage of a person dying from lack of health insurance and health care. Similarly, there are no photos of government "death circles," since these are merely an imaginary figment.
But the opponents had a good idea, which was by spreading falsehoods and mobilizing health care companies and the uninformed but worried, they could create a very visual impression that "the people" were against Obamacare, that they feared it, that they thought they would lose access to their own doctor and perhaps to Medicare. And so the crowds of the confused became the visual that was replayed endlessly, and it in turn attracted more "activists" to the cause. That strategy worked very well, and it nearly worked totally, as the "Harry and Louise" commercials did during the Clinton years.
Anyhow, no matter what conservatives claim about the heavy hand of government, and how it might strangle, just strangle BP and the rest of the profit-making free enterprise system, there will always be those oil-soaked dead pelicans. The problem is much harder to deny, and harder to treat as an abstraction. So the tactics of opposition that the Republican conservatives have been employing quite effectively just aren't getting the same degree of traction in this current crisis.
In the same way, the destruction by the Japanese of Pearl Harbor clinched the case of American involvement in the war that was raging in Europe and the Pacific. Pictures are very powerful; they bypass many other parts of the brain (just like smell does) and they can have enormous influence on behavior and attitudes, in the arena of politics and public policy, as elsewhere.
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