Call it the summer of our discontent. For the past month, activists on both sides of the health care debate have held dueling rallies and town hall meetings all across the state. Last Wednesday, the battle came to Madison, when conservative critics of health care reform held a pep rally at the Madison Marriott West hotel. About 1,700 people showed up and gave ABC's "20/20" co-anchor John Stossel a standing ovation after he warned that the Obama overhaul would lead to death panels, Big Government run amuck and rationed care.

A few miles away, about 80 activists who support health care reform gathered at the Middleton firehouse to watch Michael Moore's movie "SiCKO." One of their guests of honor was a stand-up comic. "We needed to do something to cheer ourselves up," explains Marcia Riquelme, a community organizer with the Dane Grassroots Network.

It's been a rough summer for local health care activists. They've lost several beloved champions, including former state legislator Midge Miller and Dr. Linda Farley and, last week, Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the only national leaders who might have been able to bust through the current stalemate in Congress. After giving up their dreams for a single-payer government-run program and accepting a more modest public option, they now may not see even that compromise measure survive. State advocates had timed their budgets, schedules, campaigns and energy to culminate in mid-summer, when they figured Congress would finally vote on a reform bill. Instead, the measure stalled, lawmakers left for August recess, and conservative rivals pounced.

For the past month, exhausted activists have been on the ropes as conservative hecklers tried to disrupt town hall meetings across Wisconsin. Rep. Steve Kagen was the first to get clobbered at his Aug. 3 forum in Green Bay. Activists, who have struggled all year to get even a mention of their marches and complicated policy proposals in local media, watched in frustration as the conservative attacks made national news.

"The summer recess started pretty badly," recalls Robert Kraig, program director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin. "The right caught us by surprise with this taking over of town hall meetings." Agrees David Riemer, director of Community Advocates for Public Policy in Milwaukee, "We got hijacked by a bunch of right-wing loonies."

Last week's event at the Marriott was the conservative movement's grand finale before legislators and the spotlight return to Washington. Liberal activists debated how to respond and decided speaking out at the event would be "an exercise in futility" and only give the group more publicity, Riquelme said. Tammy Baldwin, who had been invited, also didn't show up. (Baldwin has held four town hall meetings with constituents over the telephone.)

The Marriott meeting was organized by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a right-wing organization funded in part by oil and gas conglomerates. (Health care reformers are funded in part by labor organizations.) Mark Block, a longtime operative who campaigned for Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and now runs AFP's Wisconsin chapter, says the organization is using tactics learned from watching Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The organization has doubled its Wisconsin membership this year, to 34,000, in part by holding a series of tea parties to protest government taxing and spending, he says.

"We copied the other side and duplicated how Obama recruited members to their campaign. It worked brilliantly," Block says.

Liberal activists say that the "tea baggers" are a tiny but vocal minority of Wisconsin's population. "They are doing a very good job of tapping into the anger that's out there among a segment of conservatives," says Kraig, who rejects assertions from fellow activists that the AFP is planted in "AstroTurf" and not real grass-roots support. "You can't manufacture that level of anger," he says. "Health care has become a scapegoat. It's like waving a red cape in front of a bull."

At last week's meeting, Stossel and Madison conservative radio talk show host Vicki McKenna were waving the red cape. Signs warned that no weapons were allowed and 13 police officers were patrolling to make sure there was no violence. Two huge video screens warmed up the audience in the ballroom with footage of Newt Gingrich and other conservative icons.

The event was billed as a "town hall meeting" but it ended up being much more of a "hate rally," complained Jim Yanke, a Madison health care worker who had expected a more balanced discussion. Yanke says he was so "shocked" by some of the comments he heard, especially negative remarks about illegal aliens and Hispanics, that he started to take notes on his PalmPilot.

Stossel launched a series of colorful attacks on Big Government, which he says is the true villain in the health care debate, not the Big Insurance typically blamed by activists. "There will be death panels if we do nothing" to rein in Medicare, he predicted, repeating an accusation first launched by former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Uncle Sam is already "vomiting up money" in all kinds of wasteful ways, Stossel said. To prove it, he offered photographs of his own posh beach house and ridiculed the government for offering him flood insurance to rebuild it - twice. (He took the money once and then sold the property.) Health care reform will be one more extravagance, he said. Instead, Americans need to learn to shop for their own health insurance the same way people used to save pennies when they compared the prices of cans of peas.

The real answer to the health care crisis, Stossel argues, is to "unleash the free market." Just look at how you can travel overseas and "stick a piece of plastic" into a machine and the right amount of cash comes out, he said in conclusion. "And the government can't even count the votes accurately." The audience howled with laughter and gave him a standing ovation. "Capitalism works!" he said.

Many in the audience voiced a deep distrust of government. Terry Gray, 59, a retired Madison welder and a former chairman of the Dane County Libertarian Party, has a wife with dementia in a nursing home. Under the Obama proposal, he predicts, she might be denied care completely. "It will be rationed, like they talked about on TV," he says. "I haven't looked at what the reforms actually are. But you take a bad situation and the government actually makes it worse."

Confusion over exactly what the Democrats are proposing made some in the audience suspicious. "I want someone to tell me, what is the health plan? Right now it is 1,000 pages of gobbledygook, and there are a lot of hidden things in there that tell me the government bureaucrat is going to control my health care," says Geoff Severin, an electrician from Oregon. Making matters worse, "I don't trust anybody from Chicago," he says, a remark that several others echoed.

And over and over, people complained that health care reform would allow government "bureaucrats" to control their health and their lives. "Even with my walker I came because I am absolutely against this health care business," says Betty Schurman, 79, a Madison great-grandmother. "Nothing has been good that has been run by the government and I don't trust our president as far as you can throw him." Agreed her friend, Norma Kunde, a retired nurse who lives in Middleton, "We don't need the government coming into our homes and telling us when we should die."

Everybody's watching to see how the summer battles will influence Washington. "It's been a long recess," Kraig says. "We're at a very dangerous point. This is an absolutely critical stage that could make or break health care reform. If Congress comes back, and there's some positive momentum and traction, then we can still do this. But if there's not much momentum, this thing could be over in September."

Riemer is convinced that unless reformers come up with a compromise and drop the public option, the very same kind of attacks that doomed President Bill Clinton's plan will destroy this effort. "I haven't talked about it publicly because I don't want to look like a sad sack, but we need a new approach," he says. "My fear is that unless the advocates of reform quickly begin to advance a plan that 55 to 60 percent of the members of Congress can vote for, and not a plan we would like them to vote for, then we're going to lose this thing and lose it for another ten or 15 years."

But local reformers refuse to give up. Just last week, they went back to Green Bay with Kagen. There was still plenty of angry opposition from conservatives, but it didn't drown out the debate like the last time. (Organizers of the event were so concerned about Kagen's safety that they took the advice of a staffer who had done advance work for John Edwards' presidential campaign and took Kagen into a holding room before and after the event.)

Kraig predicts that soon politicians and the public will get sick of the conservatives and their strategy will backfire. "People were a little depressed at the start of the summer when there was no vote," he says. "But after the right punched them in the nose, they got revved up. This whole battle is giving people a second wind." Activists agree, and last weekend thousands of them rallied in Milwaukee as they handed Congresswoman Gwen Moore "declarations" in support of insurance reform.

"Am I getting tired?" asks Riquelme, who was there. A retired school teacher and grandmother from DeForest, she's been working full time on reform since 2008. "Yes. It's been a busy summer and an unexpected challenge. But we're not going to ever give up."

sdoherty@madison.com

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