I've doorbelled a few thousand doors over the last three months and I get a surprising (since I am a City Council candidate) number of questions about the national health care debate. I don't see the Dems' issue as one of debate framing, I see it as one where we are behind the curve in getting facts to people. Facts are always more difficult to get out there than the fiction from the teabaggers, if only because facts take longer to explain than a baldfaced lie, but we have to do a better job.
I chatted for about 30 minutes last week with a strong GOP family and the "facts" they were giving me were frighteningly backwards. Since the Dad has prostate cancer (PCa), he was particularly zeroing in on PCa-related nonsense he'd heard on TV. Since I have some expertise in this area (OK, more than "some" expertise
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=11…) it was an interesting conversation that ended with him promising to send me an e-mail (as soon as he could create a one-time account so I couldn't report him to the private insurance companies he was "working" so he could get full coverage) and me promising to send him peer-reviewed research data to show he was being lied to.
If we're going to win this one, we will have to do it one-on-one at our bars, dinner tables, coffee joints, and bus stops. We simply have to be consistently armed with REAL FACTS and know precisely where to send people for the right information.
David Miller