Buried within the selective memory and partisan finger-pointing Paul Krugman makes an admission and asks a question:

For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?

Perhaps Scott Rasmussen can explain:

For all the back and forth about the “public option,” Congressional Budget Office estimates and proposed tax hikes, the fundamentals are really what make health-care reform a hard sell to American voters...The most important fundamental is that 68% of American voters have health-insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. That number comes from polling conducted this past weekend of 1,000 likely voters. Most of these voters approach the health-care reform debate fearing that they have more to lose than to gain...Adding to President Barack Obama’s challenge as he sells health-care reform to the public is the fact that most voters are skeptical about the government’s ability to do anything well...There’s also the reality that 74% of voters rate the quality of care they now receive as good or excellent. And 50% fear that if Congress passes health-care reform, it will lead to a decline in the quality of that care.

or maybe Peggy Noonan:

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate. They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan...And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

...the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack...All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens...The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case...As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics...Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.

Always ready to one-up the AFL-CIO, the SEIU was first to violence, and scores a conference call.