Is there a Method to President Obama’s apparent madness?

We’ve seen the temper tantrums on TV:

Some health care reform advocates are getting a bit unnerved at some of the loud protests that they are seeing at town halls; e. g., Nate Silver says:

Occam’s Razor would suggest that a decent number of Congressmen will be scared sh*tless after seeing some number of their constituents yell at them. Yes, there might be a few who feel greater solidarity for the cause in the face of all the misinformation and screaming. Yes, there might be a few who feel repelled by the incivility of the protests. Yes, there might be a few who recognize that, even if the health care bill is fairly unpopular at the time of its passage, a failure to pass a bill would be worse for both political and policy reasons.

But Congressmen are, by and large, not the deepest people on earth. They like being popular. They don’t like getting yelled at. They don’t like taking risks. I still think health care reform is more likely than not.

But where have we seen this before? Sure, stuff like this happened when social conservatives pushed for continued segregation, but that was a long time ago. We’ve seen stuff like this much more recently…

How did that work out for them??

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