Posted on 08/10/2009 2:38:30 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If there's one thing Democrats should have learned from the contentious and unsuccessful attempt to pass public healthcare reform in the Clinton Administration, it's this: never lose control of the narrative.
Though much attention is paid to how President Clinton brought his own complex bill to Congress in '93-94 - in contrast to President Obama's decision to let Congress carry the ball this time - the real story of that disaster was the framing of the issue in public.
Then, Democrats lost control of the gut-level, short-story branding of public healthcare. Despite endless public hearings, townhalls, and polite op-ed discussions, the enemies of progress in this country succeeded in making a simpler, more direct case against healthcare for more Americans.
And the bad guys won.
So what's new this summer? Well, the top-down strategy of the Clinton years is gone. The Obama Administration has ceded the crafting of reform to Congress, while still making the issue its top domestic priority. Congress has pulled together five or six different plans, while predictably running an overhaul of the nation's expensive and lagging healthcare system through the leadership destruction juicer known as "bipartisanship." Now, you can argue whether that was the right call. And you can worry about Blue Dog Democrats, the leadership of the Speaker and Majority Leader, moderate Republicans, and the versions of various bills winding their way through committees.
But you can't argue this: once again, Democrats have lost control of the narrative.
As Congress began its recess, town hall meetings are erupting in staged dissent and violence. Democrats who expected polite discussion over the various facets of reform - cost controls, healthcare co-ops, prescription plans, and so on - are being met with sharp elbows, loud bellowing voices, and hateful disinformation. Public healthcare is being compared to Nazi medicine. The specter of euthanasia is used as a scare tactic to rile up the elderly. Obama is compared to Hitler. Or wears white face as the Joker. Of course, commentators like Steve Perlstein are right:
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
And so we wring our hands, and decry their low, inherently evil tactics - expecting somehow that common decency will prevail, and that the general polity will magically rise in disgust against the bullies. And while we're all screaming about Rush Limbaugh and arguing over astroturfing "activists," the forces arrayed against public healthcare are stealing the narrative, like the sticky-fingered back half of a crack pick-pocket team.
Sure, it's outrageous. And the mainstream media immediately goes into its fair and balanced relativism act, thereby showering the belligerent anti-reform mob with legitimacy. Yeah, Paul Krugman is correct:
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
But they don't have to be right. They just have to be loud. And quite frankly, Democrats - from the President to both delegations in Congress - have done a lousy job of framing the issue, of making the clear and simple case for why public healthcare is good for all Americans.
It shouldn't have come to this. Our ducks should have been in line months ago. Simple and straightforward slogans. Effective advertising. Faces of the uninsured, the underinsured, and declining standards of care. Famous spokespeople and surrogates. Millions of boots on the ground. All of it wired for action and success by a killer social media operation. You know, like the campaign. But as Peter Daou pointed out earlier this week, this is far different than an election campaign. Of the reasons Peter cited, one stood out to me:
Inside baseball is less effective when you're on the inside. The media manipulation that helped win the White House, the masterful messaging, the leaks, the back-scratching, the hard-hitting conference calls with strategists and advisers while the candidate stayed above it all, the playing of one outlet and one reporter against the other, the smart turns of phrase, the snarky retorts, the outsider vs. insider kabuki, all these lose a good deal of potency when campaigning gives way to governing. Especially when bankers are running away with taxpayer money, polls are shifting and the public is hurting.
Yeah, exactly. Yet one aspect to this whole looming disaster (and I say anything less than a legitimate public option is a disaster for this Administration and this Congress) really is surprising.
And that's the level of Democratic surprise itself.
Oh, we're so shocked and outraged. But this was easy to see coming. This is the real kitchen sink thrown against Barack Obama. It was inevitable. Indeed, the conservative leadership that follows Limbaugh was transparent in both its strategy and its organizing - the anti-progress forces said were out to hand the President a landmark defeat. They wanted him to fail. And no they've put thugs on the ground in pursuit of that goal.
This was hardly a sneak attack. And for a political operation that was incredibly savvy, fast-moving and professional during the 2008 campaign to somehow seem flat-footed against the lame-ass birthers, and tea-baggers and Rush fans is dispiriting. As Josh Marshall wondered aloud this week, "where's the other team?"
I could go on about what the Administration has to do to save the day, but I just don't have the energy. It feels to me like the narrative battle's been lost, and it'll be hell to get it back. Besides, you kind of sense the will isn't necessarily there among our leaders - or the very ground troops that brought Obama to victory - to fight this one to the finish. So maybe Bob Stein's right to grab a few lines from Yeats to sum up his despair:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
There shouldn’t be a ‘narrative’ or some other legislative ‘strategy’. All that’s required is the open and honest truth. Unintentionally the author is admitting that the democrat version of ‘health care’ has to be packaged just right and ‘sold’ to the public. Openly stating what their intentions are will not be acceptable to the American public, and liberals are well aware of this.
They’re just looking for the right ‘spoonful of sugar’ to help their bad medicine go down the throats of the American people.
” Don’t you read the New York Times, Huffington Post, Newsweek and The Nation?”
No. I don’t have much time for fiction.
Even the DUmmies are wanting the damn thing killed.
It's a tricky thing to convince a sheep not just to be shorn, but to be turned into chops and a nice Sunday roast.
They still can’t believe that the average citizens who actually works for a living is one out there demonstrating.
I learned a long time ago that while nebulous things that affect people tangentially don’t register, mess with their pockets and the change in them which is what the left is doing with healthcare, and you have a revolt on your hands.
Don’t screw around with people’s money.
Obama is used to using ACORN tactics to get his way. The kind of people around him, and the kind of tactics he has learned and used, and the success he has had with it, have made him a legend in his own mind. He just does not understand the American people and their love of liberty.
He seems to have done what I and some others have hoped he would do from the beginning: He has overreached. The American people (even most Democrats, I think) know enough to be suspicious of a politician who tries to effect so much “change” this quickly.
Individual Democrat Senators and Congressmen in the next few weeks are going to have to decide which is more important—their career or what little self-respect they have left.
I stopped reading right here. Pure Lib propaganda.
Why all the belly aching...they have 60 votes in the Senate, plenty in the House. Pass it if they want and “own” it...but there’s the rub, they don’t want to “own” it, and the reason they can’t pass it is because of dissent within their own party.
And the bad guys won. “
Progress = Programmed and scripted slide into communism or fascism. Obama flips between the two so much we just have to change it to Obamaism.
How can these inside the beltway dandies claim “disinformation” when there are six bills in play and any combination of measures might be included. We might be encouraged or required to accept assisted suicide. We will certainly be required to pay more in deficit spending. It’s only a question of how much the blue dog pussies will deal away for.
So far, only about 49% or 50% have realized this. That's the general disapproval number, while Rasmussen's "strongly disapprove" number is still below 40%. We can only hope it gets closer to 60%, to counteract the electoral shenanigans that will be applied with even more force in the coming election cycles.
He doesn’t understand he can’t scale the corruption up. The city machines keep power because someone’s nephew, sister, son or father is on the payroll or a vendor to the machine. Pork is leveraged. Obama’s own wife is a perfect example of how it works. He and Michelle fed off the system and everyone around them was fat and happy.
But go out from the center and the leverage dissipates. There is nothing in this bill for the vast majority of Americans. No SEIU members in my circle. No pork is coming our way. All that is coming our way are higher taxes and rationing—both of which will be used to feed the corrupt machine around Obama.
This article reveals Democrat policy. They will not change their direction or premise. They are convinced people cannot make their own decisions. They will continue to push for total control of every aspect of your life, and when they lose, they will simply put a new brand of lipstick on the same old pig and trot it out again and again.
This case cannot be made because it isn't good for all Americans. It's great for those who won't be paying anything and sucks for everyone else.
The other issue is that Dems wanted to frame the debate topics around specifics of the plan. If you come to the table and discuss this, you've already ceded to their plan in the first place, the rest is just detail.
They’ve become political terrorists,
From people who wont call terrorists,terrorists.
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