ACA defenders don't need to "learn from" the Tea Party. They beat them in 2009-10

The fight to save the ACA is on, and all across the land, progressive groups large and small are mobilizing the law's supporters to let their senators and reps know the cost of dis-insuring 20 million people -- more, if Republicans block-grant Medicaid and/or collapse the individual market, less if they pass some poorly funded and designed facsimile of the ACA.

In reaction to the 35 "protect our care" rallies staged across the land on Sunday (Jan. 15), I keep seeing sentiments to the effect of  "progressives are learning from the Tea Party."  That's a half-truth at best, in that supporters of the ACA-in-progress fought protestors at least to a draw in 2009-2010 (proponents won in the sense that they got the ACA passed, but they did (briefly) have a 60-vote Senate majority and a large House majority). The ACA would never have got anywhere near the finish line without the most massive grass-roots advocacy ever achieved.

The Tea Party protests against the ACA-in-progress at Town Hall meetings in the long hot summer of 2009 have become part of American political lore. What’s less well known is that progressive groups supporting health reform fought back on the spot, often with equal or superior manpower and local impact. The media preferred the screamers, of course.

There was a massive coordinated effort led by Health Care for American Now (HCAN), an umbrella organization for groups committed to universal healthcare, formed in the runup to the 2008 election. Member groups’ ability to muster supporters provided vital support that kept many representatives and senators committed to passing the bill that became the ACA.

Yes We HCAN, sort of: Richard Kirsch's blow-by-blow account of the grassroots battle for health reform

I have been picking my Twitter-induced-ADHD-addled way through Richard Kirsch's Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States, published in 2012. Kirsch, a lifelong public action exec trained by Ralph Nader, was national campaign manager from 2008-12 for Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a massive umbrella group formed by unions and progressive nonprofits to advocate for universal health care. The book is a blow-by-blow account of the organizing and lobbying efforts that built support for the ACA and pushed it over the finsih line.

This is one of those blog-as-you-read posts, which you could make a case against, but which I enjoy doing as a book pulls me in various directions. I'm on vacation this week and will not trouble myself with excerpts. So far (I'm a bit more than halfway through), the two themes dominate:

o The ACA would not have been possible without massive, coordinated grassroots organizing -- meeting constantly with congressional reps, recruiting people who suffered for lack of health insurance access to tell their stories, raising large numbers of demonstrators to counter the Tea Party at Town Halls, calibrating support for and pressure on wavering reps, etc.

o Squishiness on the public option on the part of Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole was a self-inflicted wound that gravely weakened reform. I do not entirely buy into this, and I have much more yet to read about how that fight played out. That said, a few takeaways and preliminary thoughts:

1. The Tea Party's hysterical, misinformation-fueled, rage-filled hijackings of congressional reps' town hall meetings focused on health care in the summer of 2009 anticipate the Trump rallies of today -- with reps shouted down and drowned out by chants, disabled citizens testifying about their health care struggles booed off the stage, posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache, and equations of end-of-life counseling with genocide.  The funding of these oppo efforts by the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity trace a line from hardcore ideological libertarianism to Trumpian fascism, the common denominator being the sabotage of fact-based discourse.