I think I'm going to puke

In a recent ad, Michael Steele continues the Republican Party's scare the living crap out of seniors strategy.  As Washington Monthly points out, this on top of suggesting last week that Social Security should be privatized.

just last week, Steele said -- within a 24-hour timeframe -- that Medicare is a) a great government program that Democrats are trying to undermine and the GOP is trying to protect; and b) a terrible program that doesn't work and should probably be privatized. And this only came after Steele ran one of the all-time dumbest op-eds to ever run on health care policy.

I obviously have a different opinion of Steele than most progressives do, for me, I think he's scary because he is extremely TV savvy and comes across on TV as both reasonable and friendly.  This is a dangerous trait for someone who has absolutely no grasp of public policy.  I don't know what Steele's favorability numbers are like, but it seems to me like if they're not high its probably because of a lack of exposure, because he is very good at these scripted appearances in commercials, and I think progressives ignore that at their peril.

For anyone with a firm grasp of the health care debate, as is usually the case, Steele's ad is a piece of crap, its dishonest and as a result wholly unconvincing.  The trouble is that low information voters just get his folksy demeanor and are likely to accept the talking points.  This debate has been totally mishandled on the left side, and as a result we've got an uninformed population of seniors who think Obama's trying to kill them.  We should have been talking about Republican hostility to medicare and Social Security on day one of this debate, at this point in terms of public perceptions I fear the only way out is to have an epic battle between millennials and their grandparents.  Maybe we need to invoke the Sarah Silverman strategy over health care, it is absolutely insane that the primary group of people who get government health insurance (and like it) have been scared so thoroughly that they're the one's standing in the way of getting something for the rest of us.  This concludes my semi-pointless rant, I really had to get that out of my system, if I keep going this post may never end.