NP: Little Feat, Let It Roll

The current state of Health Care Reform has me thinking about how fast things move on the Internet again. Less than 24 hours after the Massachusetts special election, Josh Marshall was sincerely complaining that we hadn't heard from President Obama on the subject.

This is the new Internet bubble, and it's both fascinating and, to my mind, very, very dangerous. Crowdsourcing the remaining options on reform produced some pretty cogent analysis of why the Democrats' best option is almost certainly to have the House pass the Senate bill and address its shortcomings through reconciliation. And it produced that analysis very quickly.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't actually work on Internet time, despite what people who live every minute of the day online might think. So when public figures don't respond to something immediately, the natives get very, very restless. Then despondent. Then angry, all while people who don't have the luxury of the hive mind and vast amounts of free time are gathering the same information that led said hive mind to its conclusion. So, even if the decision-makers come around, the activists have lost faith in the process.

I think that what we're seeing in Congress is a slower-moving version of exactly the same thing that happened in less than 24 hours on the Internet. Initially, there was shock and intense pessimism, but as options get weighed -- and as more and more experts weigh in -- my sense is still that the House may end up agreeing with the left side of the Internet that there are far more downsides to inaction. And that the President may not be disengaging as much as he recognizes that there may be a better time and place to exert whatever pressure he has left to apply on the process.

Of course, preaching patience does not convey that sense of things happening, and if things are moving slowly when you're getting dozens of Twitter and Facebook updates every minute, it looks very much like they're not moving at all. For a community that brags about being "reality-based," there needs to be some recognition of how that reality behaves temporally in the real world.