In 2009, when Barack Obama traveled to Bristol, Virginia, for a town hall to promote the Affordable Care Act, his motorcade passed a small but turbulent protest. I was raised just outside this small Appalachian city, and even then, three years after graduating from high school, I knew it desperately needed health care reform. At the time, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute, almost a fifth of Bristol's residents under age 65 had no health insurance—one of the highest rates in the state. And yet, when Obama arrived, people greeted him with signs that read SOCIALISM ISN'T COOL and OBAMA: “GOD” DECIDES LIFE AND DEATH NOT YOU OR NATIONAL HEALTHCARE.
Six months into his first term, Obama was facing this kind of opposition not just in Bristol, but nationwide, even in districts he'd won the previous fall. Alarmed by conservative talk radio hosts and the constant harping of an intransigent Republican Party, many Americans believed that the ACA would rip apart the fabric of American life. “No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia,” conservative columnist Cal Thomas warned.
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