As the right wingers' chickens come home to roost, isn't this the time to step up the effort to help Americans understand their TRUE self-interest?

As I read Mags's interesting account below of her surprised and surprising political conversation with a local businessman with whom she assumed she would have very little in common philosophically, an assumption that proved incorrect, I was thinking of my old political guru Milt Shook, whom I recall saying a number of times that as people were exposed to the RESULTS of the hard-right-wing economic policies of the Bush administration, they would begin to discover that this wasn't what they signed up for. (Since much of the Bush program has required outright lying at every stage, calling black white and up down, you know that even THEY know that the people would never buy those initiatives if they were honestly presented.)

Of course the process is always slower to develop than one wishes, and doesn't work out as neatly or comprehensively. But maybe it IS true that eventually people notice. I'm still waiting to see how it will play out Nov. 7 and beyond, but it does appear that we may be on the verge of witnessing some political chickens coming home to roost.

This seems to me all the more reason to despise the Rahm Emanuel approach: figure out what people want to hear and say it to them. It's much tougher to work out a political program that is truly in the interest of the largest number of people and then and then help people understand why this is so. But when those chickens are finally coming home to roost, illustrating the real-world consequences of Bushonomics, and the neocon divorced-from-reality worldview, and the rest, isn't this the time to be trying to open people's minds?