The grassroots campaign to defend Lakewood’s publicly owned charity hospital, from a privatization/liquidation scheme, failed for a variety of reasons. The one I think about most often is an entirely avoidable self-inflicted injury, resulting from such trivial explanations as to be absurd.
It’s time the tale were told.
“Save Lakewood Hospital” was a simple message. Based on all available evidence, it was overwhelmingly popular with the community. Lakewood has the right of initiative and referendum, and getting adequate valid signatures was not difficult for this campaign. “Yes, Save Lakewood Hospital” should have been a landslide electoral success. How, instead, did it end up narrowly defeated?
Dishonesty by the schemers at City Hall and the Cleveland Clinic was certainly part of that. No one really advocated “we should close and liquidate Lakewood Hospital.” They evaded, they made up excuses; to muddy the waters, they created an astroturf counter-campaign, a fake newspaper, and put up yard signs implying that a “yes” vote on the 2015 initiative was actually for the “deal,” which many people probably interpreted as meaning “closing the hospital.”
But I don’t think that should or would have been enough without huge missteps by Save Lakewood Hospital, including one all-time example of “whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.”
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