National healthcare and thuggers = possibly political shifts

Earlier this week, several polls came out noting that support for public-option national healthcare HUGELY divided on age lines, with senior citizens either largely deceived by Republican lies that Medicare allegedly isn't a government program, or else out of pure "I got mine" greed, strongly opposed, 40-64 folks neutral to favorable and under 40 definitely favorable.

Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post, after calling the deceptions oriented toward the first group of seniors “a flat-out lie”:

By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

closes with a note to the Jim DeMints of the world, on the political issue:

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

Indeed, if we want to put this in terms of raw political calculus, this can be a counter-shift as big or bigger than Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” only this time, generational.

So, can, and will, Obama do it? Stay tuned.