Micheal Moore is someone who stirs up a lot of strong reactions, positive and negative. While there is definitely some truth to the criticism of Moore's work that it has a strong bias and while Moore does intend to provoke people and often ends up turning off some of the very people he would probably like most to reach, I think that this is all going to be beside the point with his latest documentary, Sicko. I have read great reviews about this film, even from some very mainstream sources that usually can't abide anything to the left of Hillary Clinton. Of course the right will push its talking points and smear tactics through to many of the usual suspects in the MSM and the healthcare industry will bombard Americans with a counter-offensive of the usual propoganda. But there appears to be some indication that these efforts may not be that successful.

In his July 16, review of Sicko, Christopher Hayes explains why Moore's latest documentary may resonate with a more widespread audience that is not usually receptive to his work and is sometimes downright hostile to Moore himself:

...unlike in his previous film Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore focuses relatively little attention on the villains in his story, choosing instead simply to allow their victims to tell their tales. It's a montage of hard luck and innocence. [Moore introduces] us to the horror stories all too typical among even the 250 million Americans fortunate enough to have health insurance....In what may be a tacit acknowledgment of this unfortunate fact, Sicko is different from Moore's last two efforts. Not just because of an absence of gimmicky gotcha moments, or a reduction in screen time for Moore himself, but because its topic isn't fundamentally polarizing in the way his previous works were. There's a whole lot of Americans who love their guns, and in 2004 there were a lot of Americans who loved their President, but it's pretty hard to find anyone who loves their health insurance company.

(Emphasis mine) It seems Moore might have hit upon something that will allow him to reach the audience he has wanted to connect with, the "blue-collar factory workers and members of the working class" that has been largely hostile to Moore, as well as the vast majority of the middle class, as this film is about the working and middle classes who do have insurance and the hell that they often expereince at the hands of their, as I like to call them, homicidal HMOs.

Hayes points out the irony in the fact that the group of Americans that Moore has always wanted to speak to, the "elusive Reagan Democrat--the heartland-dwelling, beer-drinking, blue-collar guy (or gal) who bowls on the weekend, loves his country and is fighting to stay afloat in winner-take-all America" is the group that Moore has so often angered and alienated in the past because, despite his "accesible, populist voaculary, his public image is that of an ideologue, a lighting rod, a polarizing figure: more Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan."

The reason Moore has been unable to connect with his target audiene may have as much to do with the overall political climate of the past few decades than Moore himself. Hayes' recounts an interesting story from the last chapter in Moore's book, Downsize This!:

Moore spends the final chapter of his first book...talking to Norman Olson, a co-founder of the Michigan Militia: "You know, you guys were right in the sixties," Olson tells him. "The government lied to us.... So when we finally wised up in the nineties after all these jobs were lost, where were you liberals when we needed your help?" Writing in this magazine in November 1997, in an article titled "Is the Left Nuts? (Or Is It Me?)," Moore asked a variation of the same question, "just who the hell is reading this? Who is the Nation readership? Is it my brother-in-law, Tony, back in Flint, who last night was installing furnace ducts until 9 o'clock?"

(Emphasis mine) Although the tone of this documentary is different than Moore's past works, according to the reviews that I've read, Moore does provide a context for the healthcare crisis in America. In doing so, he brings up Regan, which I hope, if Moore's target audience actually watches this film, will at least trigger some doubt with more people that a lot of what they have been fed by the right in the past few decades is pretty much bullshit. As Hayes points out:

It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative. As chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Reagan was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions. Reagan would be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he spent propagandizing the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged the distinctive Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an amiable uncle.

So as momentum for national, universal healthcare built during the Truman Administration, foes such as the American Medical Association sought to build grassroots opposition. In an ingenious stroke, as Moore reports in Sicko, it organized thousands of coffee klatches across the country where suburban housewives could sip coffee, gossip and listen to a special recorded message about the evils of socialized medicine, a message delivered by the one and only Ronald Reagan.

(Emphasis mine) Maybe there is reason for hope...