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One thing felt certain: A pretty big chunk of the American people including some of the very folks I was trying to help. didn't trust a work I said! One night around then I watched a news report on charitable organization called Remote Area Medical that provided medical services in temporary pop-up clinics around the country, operating out of trailers parked outside arenas and fairgrounds. Almost all the patients in the report were white southerners from places like Tennessee, Georgia,
and West Virginia-men and women who had jobs but no employer-based insurance or had insurance with deductibles they couldn't afford.
Many had driven hundreds of miles- some sleeping in their cars over-night, leaving the engines running to stay warm -to join hundreds of other people lined up before dawn to see one of the volunteer doctors who might pull an infected tooth, diagnose debilitating abdominal pain, or examine a lump in their breast. The demand was so great that pa-
tients who arrived after sunup sometimes got turned away.
I found the story both heartbreaking and maddening, an indictment of a wealthy nation that failed too many of its citizens. And yet I knew that almost every one of those people waiting to see a free doctor came from a deep-red Republican district, the sort of place where opposition to our healtheare bill, along with support of the Tea Party, was likely to be strongest. There had been a time--back when I was still a state senator driving around southern Illinois or, later, traveling through rural
Iowa during the earliest days of the presidential campaign- when I could reach such voters. I wasn't yet well known enough to be the target of caricature, which meant that whatever preconceptions people may have had about a Black guy from Chicago with a foreign name could be
dispelled by a simple conversation, a small gesture of kindness. After sitting down with folks in a diner or hearing their complaints at a county fair, I might not get their vote or even agreement on most issues. But we would at least make a connection, and we'd come away from such encounters understanding that we had hopes, struggles, and values in common.
I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived locked behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.
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