President Obama's sustained push to radically rework American medicine has triggered an enormous backlash among Americans who have come to understand that despite his repeated promises to the contrary, the president's scheme will cause many millions to lose the health insurance they have and see it replaced by the so-called "government option/public plan."

At the same time there is a spreading recognition that the massive "stimulus" package not only didn't work, it worsened the jobs situation in the country by signaling businesses small and large that fiscal irresponsibility on a scale never before imaginable had arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and that the years ahead would be rough. Payrolls have been trimmed drastically as a result, and now the Federal Reserve is predicting sustained and high unemployment. The president's talk of "saving or creating millions of jobs" is just that --talk. The jobs crisis is real and continuing and the Obama Administration has no plan to surge employment.

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This double Democratic whammy on the country's sense of security has launched two grassroots initiatives, the success of which signals that the GOP's grassroots are growing again.

First, the National Center for Policy Analysis launched a petition to stop Obamacare which soared past 700,000 signatures this week, on the way to a million and a huge impact on the United States Senate. (You can and should add your name here, and encourage all your friends and family to do the same if you and they want to keep your health insurance.) On Thursday's radio show I asked Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona --the GOP's #2 in the upper chamber-- about the effectiveness of such petitions. His response:

HH: All right, let’s talk politics. We’ve been helping the National Center for Policy Analysis get their petition up to a million. Right now, we’re about 667,000 signatures.

JK: That’s incredible. It’s great.

HH: Does that matter? As a Senator…

JK: Absolutely!

HH: Does that matter?

JK: It matters. You bet it matters. In fact, it’s the whole ballgame here. You know, inside baseball, oh, the Obama health care deal is a done deal. And they bludgeoned all kinds of the doctors and the hospitals and the drug companies and the insurances companies, this is going to be a done deal, so you might as well come to the table and get the scraps that we’re willing to give you in exchange for going along with what we’re going to do here. And a lot of folks thought that that was the case. But little by little, as soon as it has seen the light of day, folks have realized what’s in these bills, and have said no way. We do not want our, first of all, a huge, probably at least $2 trillion dollar spending bill on top of what we’ve done already, we don’t want to go into that much debt, and especially if it’s going to effect our own insurance coverage. On Medicare, by the way, you know, Medicare is unsustainable. The administration has said that. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to try to save some money in Medicare, meaning provide fewer services to seniors, and are we going to then make Medicare healthy? No. We’re going to take that “savings” and use it to cover more Americans. So there are a lot of features here that the American people don’t like, and they’re very anxious about. And the longer it hangs out, the more they see that. That then has an impact on members of Congress, whereas I think members thought at one point this was a done deal, now you see Democrats and Republicans saying not so fast, we don’t think so, because of what their constituents are telling them. So petitions, e-mails, telephone calls, letters, visits with members of Congress over the August recess, all of these things are critical to folks expressing their point of view. You have a right to do it, you need to do it, and if you do it right, I think we can stop this legislation, and reform health care in a sensible way.