Karl Klockars

If you’re like me, you spent more time watching C-span on Sunday than you’ve ever spent cumulatively in your entire life.*  If you spent that afternoon and evening flipping back and forth between C-span and ABC Family’s marathon of Harry Potter films, then I’ll thank you to get out of my living room and kindly never return.

In any event, we now live in a country where Health Care Reform (or since I live on twitter, I can’t think of reform without thinking “#hcr”) is happening, and unless you haven’t been paying attention to anything over the past year or so, this makes certain people terribly, terribly upset.

Our President is going to take the opportunity of the passage of his first major legislation, and one of the biggest pieces of lawmaking sausage in decades, to take a quick spin around the country to smile and wave, to shake hands and kiss babies, to continue to tell us how much of a f*cking big deal this reform is, and generally show us his glowing orb of awesomeness that got him elected in the first place.

The first place he’s going to head to is beautiful Iowa, where this all began so many years ago.  (Aside: I miss the presidential primary season tremendously.  I’m going to put a shiny nickel on Romney taking the next one on the GOP side so I’m already not excited about it.)  So if I may take this opportunity to lend the President some suggestions while he’s out of town, I think he might find that they’ll come in handy while trying to relate to the Red State Crew for the first time in a while.

See, it’s going to take a lot of work to reconnect with that center band of Americana that got Obama elected, since it very likely has been pissed off by the last few months of lawmaking.  We’re a reactive species, and it’s always easier to play defense and say “no” over and over with our fingers in our ears.  And the Obama administration didn’t exactly do a great job telling us exactly how great this would work, they just kinda had to say over and over again “this isn’t socialism” and shrug at the Tea Partiers.

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that might help you get a few steps toward a reconciliation with those types that are a bit stung by all the high-fiving from Washington as you signed the Health Care Reform (cough, #hcr) into law.  (And, just out of curiosity, since the president is left-handed, do you think he smeared ink all over the signed version of the bill?  That happened to me all the time.  On homework, not on national legislation, that is.)

1)  Shoot an M-16.

There’s something very visceral about the image of someone shooting a firearm.  It comes with a lot of baggage if it’s an anonymous figure – when it’s the President of the United States, that Samsonite gets even heavier.  Considering every story that wasn’t about the Inauguration in January was basically “gun store owners selling guns like crazy because Obama’s going to take our rights away” there’s already a pretty big assumption that this crazy Socialist is going to take all our handguns.  (It’d give people another reason to break out Hitler quotes again.)

So what would it hurt the President to head out to a shooting range, shake some hands and say hi to some (I’m assuming) Republican voters and turn on the charm?  Then he could shoulder an assault rifle, squeeze off a few clips worth of ammo and BLOW THEIR FREAKING MINDS.

It’d win him back a few hearts and minds, and hell, shooting guns is fun.  He  could probably blow off a little stress and tension.  Bonus points would go through the roof if there was a Bin Laden target at the other end of the range.  The right-wing commentators wouldn’t know what the hell to do with themselves.

2) Wrench on a car engine.

We’ve had to suffer through months and months of paperwork and legalese and parliamentary procedure and lawmaking business and a whole  bunch of shit that we can’t really understand.  What we can understand?  Sometimes things break down, and you have to fix them.  Where is the most direct place we ever experience that kind of repair in our lives?  The family vehicle.  Do most of us have Priuses that require a mechanic to switch out a cable?  No, we still have a bunch of hunks of steel that we can work on.

Go to a garage.  Look under the hood of a vehicle or two.  Maybe grab a wrench and change an alternator belt or switch out a gasket or two.  It would prove that even though the President may be more comfortable in front of a class as a law professor, the guy still might be able to change his own oil.  Earn back that common-man appeal that you had before.

3)  Make a big deal out of eating a hamburger again.

Remember when talking about arugula was a big deal?  Remember those heady days back when the administration was new in town, and it was a huge deal that the president and the VP went to a Five Guys?  I haven’t heard a single word about what fast food the President has been eating, and quite frankly, I want the guy to have a french fry and a burger in public again.  Oh, sure, there will be a lot of complaining about Obamacare crushing down on us and forcing us to not eat burgers, and burger taxes, and burger death panels that will keep us from recieving health care if we’ve eaten a burger.  Push that aside and stop at a Hardees.  Live a little bit.

4)  Get us some freaking jobs out here.

This one should be a gimme.  But we aren’t going to care about a great first year and a half when we’re sinking further into a big mess that you should be paying attention to at the same time.  Ask Bush the First about that.  He was king of the world after the first Gulf War.  And how’d that work out?

———-

Okay, just a few thoughts.  It’ll really end up being nothing but “hey look how great this is” and “isn’t all this reform fantastic” and “yes we can” all over again.  Which is fine!  But Obama still has all those people in his back pocket.  The true believers will still be there in the end.  Now is the time to go out and get back some of the people that have strayed away, and it might take more than just speeches and inspiration this time.

After that, the real question is: What happens next?  Immigration reform?  Back to gays in the military?  Death penalty?  Financial reworking of our entire economy?  Handing everything over to the Chinese and being done with it?  Or maybe some basic low-level maintenance of the country?  Who knows?  At least he’ll have two and a half years do it.  He’ll need it.

*Honestly, that wasn’t that hard to accomplish.