Put another way – why should employers get to decide what insured Americans get access to? The Teabaggers didn’t think that the government should have that ability (not that the recent health insurance legislation ever proposed doing so), so why should it be okay for employers to restrict access, as Republican politicians are advocating?
All that said, this whole thing wouldn’t even be an issue if universal health care was enacted instead of forcing millions of Americans into the for-profit insurance industry.
Democrats continue to refuse to look at how important framing and messaging is in driving a core set of principles. Republicans figured out their importance decades ago and that’s a big reason why this country has taken such a radical turn to the extreme right since.
Why is these two abstract concepts so important? Take the recent health care debate as an example. Specifically, let’s look at the public option and what Republicans did about it internally:
At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News’ controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network’s journalists not to use the phrase “public option.”
Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox’s reporters should use “government option” and similar phrases — wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats’ reform efforts.
Did this doom the public option all by itself? Of course not. But these phrases resonate with folks who have been purposefully trained to think of anything the government does as inefficient and wasteful (on the nice side of the spectrum). Republicans have mastered the two-word soundbite culture. The phrases that pass through Luntz’s playbook and into the Republican machine are some of the most recognizable and effective in our political lexicon today.
Democrats do themselves and this country a disservice by continuing to brush framing and messaging off as something beneath their notice. They think if they fully explain every nuance of every policy, the facts by themselves will win over enough of the public to implement their ideas. It hasn’t worked in decades and it will be less effective in the future.
Opponents of the legislation, including independent groups, have spent $108 millionsince March to advertise against it.
Many of those ads are based on lies and nonsense, but there’s no law against that, is there? What’s so important about March? That’s when the bill was finally signed into law. That advertising is helping lead the Republican Teabagger wave this election cycle. So I have a question for the President and his pro-incrementalist allies: if these Republican Teabaggers control the House and shut down business in the Senate in 2011-2012, will you still argue that secret pre-negotiations and public giveaways to health care reform opponents were a good idea?
I saw some op-eds weighing in on candidates for Colorado’s junior Senate seat.
Steve from Ft. Collins represents your typical hypocritical Republican Teabagger – deficits only matter when Democrats are in power:
How well have his [Sen. Bennet's] votes represented your children and grandchildren, who will be saddled with a lifelong debt due to the reckless spending of this runaway government?
Anyone want to bet that Steve sent in an op-ed when the Bush Regime blew the deficit up from $5 Trillion to $12 Trillion in 8 short years? How about when Reagen blew up the deficit? No, as usual, Steve is trying to use a topic to cover his true concern: a corporatist Democrat who isn’t 100% white is in the White House. If Steve took the deficit seriously, he would fully support both the health insurance legislation that passed this year and push to reduce the bloated war budget. Don’t take Steve seriously.
Scott from Loveland has a good point regarding health care solutions:
These bandages [high-deductible plans and open health savings accounts, espoused by Republican Teabagger Ken Buck] have been available for years and do not address the issue of those citizens who can afford neither.
That’s true. It’s like the Republican Teabagger complaint about tax cuts: would one of you please tell the rest of us where the millions of jobs created by the Bush tax cuts are hiding? The fewest jobs of any president post-WWII were created under Republican Teabagger economic policies. The rest of us are still trying to fix your damn mess. Your solution is ridiculous and has been proven to not work the way you think it works.
Martha from Denver speaks for a lot of progressives about Sen. Bennet:
He has finally come clean and admitted that he will be voting to continue the Bush tax cuts and against the Employee Free Choice Act. [...] He may earn a few Republican votes with his tactics, but when combined with the loss of thousands of votes from registered Democrats, he will lose this election. Be clear, he will lose because he stepped right of center.
Martha argues along the same lines that I have for years – Democrats need to stand for Democratic principles. Not bipartisan principles or Republican principles; Democratic principles. The number of issues which Sen. Bennet not only voted against his base’s wishes but cynically used micro-issues to raise cash and visibility from that base prior to those votes are long indeed. It surprises me that so many Democrats are still willing to support somebody who on too many occasions hasn’t supported them. Oh, when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you’re still voting for an evil. Don’t expect a ton of good to come from that.
Baxter from Silverthorne addresses my top issue:
If Ken Buck is like every other Republican in the U.S. Senate, he will fight all attempts to curb greenhouse gas emissions with a comprehensive energy and climate bill.
While true, some additional context should be made clear. Sen. Bennet early in 2009 voted to require that climate legislation be subjected to the 60-vote super-majority instead of the 50-vote majority requirement that wins most other contests. What followed was a lot of hand-wringing and lamenting that with the largest majority in the Senate in years, 60 votes just couldn’t be found, gosh darn it. No, it’s not as though Sen. Bennet found global warming to be a leading issue of the day. Let’s not kid ourselves and blindly think Sen. Bennet is a global warming champion. If anything, he found Senate procedure to be more important than any legislative topic. Sure, he started talking about “filibuster reform” after all Senate work had ground to a near-complete halt by mid-2010. It wasn’t like Republicans abused the rule throughout all of 2009 or anything. Heck, it wasn’t even like Republicans told Democrats they would do just that when the session started, right? And after being told this, Democratic Senators still continued to try to bring one, just one, Republican over on bill after bill after bill.
Leading up to voting this year, you should ask yourself this important question: will Sen. Bennet vote to change Senate rules on the first day of business in January, when rule changes only require 50 votes instead of 67 afterward? If Sen. Bennet wins this election and Democrats retain control of the Senate, will the filibuster rules be changed back to what they were historically, or will they continue to ask the Republican Teabaggers to steamroll over them, yet come back to the voters in 2012 and ask for more money, more volunteering, and more votes from us?
Via a tweet, I found this letter to the editor, trying to argue against the inclusion of a public option in legislation this year. The Denver Post had previously written a short take in favor of Congress passing a public option.
First, the DP Ed board is pretty conservative. That said, I agree with the Post – the public option bill won’t pass this year.
Second, what is the Broomfield Con arguing? It’s actually pretty hard to tell. Something about “government controlling everything”. Eye-roll. He cites the government’s control of the American auto industry, the finance industry, the banking industry, and then tries to scare readers into thinking Congress wants to control the energy industry too!!! Oh noes!
This letter-writer obviously has no problem with the government controlling the war industry. How many of his taxpayer dollars were physically lost in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’m not talking about the supplementals funding the occupation; I’m talking about the physical bills that were well and truly lost – by Bush’s government, if it makes any difference to the writer.
The auto industry isn’t any more controlled by the government than the energy industry would be if the pathetic energy bill now being considered passes. Unfortunately, private corporations will still control the lion’s share of the generation and transmission of energy across the entire country. By the way, letter-writer, we pay dearly for that dirty energy immersed in the most inefficient infrastructure possible, just as we pay for the lack of care (but bountiful private management!) and massive inefficiencies in our health care system.
After the Bush government gave away more billions of dollars to the largest banks in the land, did this person write a letter of protest? I doubt it. Guess what those private entitie did with our taxpayer dollars, Mr. Letter-Writer. They bought smaller banks. They still aren’t lending the money to those who would help the economy to grow again – us. They’re sitting on it all, waiting until the broken economy (which they broke, by the way), finally turns around. Just as many honest observers pointed out back in 2008, the plan to dole out our tax dollars to unaccountable private industries wouldn’t pan out. Yet you sit there defending them!
If a government entity can help provide energy, or health care, or directly loan money to people who actually need it, I’m all for it. There’s an advantage in that approach, actually. Governments, unlike obscenely profitable corporations, can be held accountable. Neither you nor I can hold Bank of America or United Health or Xcel or Halliburton as accountable as we can our Representatives and Senators.
If you truly believed in the power of private industry, Mr. Letter-Writer, you would be begging for the government to offer a public option. Because if private industry was as smart and powerful as you seem to think it is, that public option would have no chance in surviving. Your attack against the editors and a public option indicates that you recognize that health care isn’t being delivered by our private entity dominated industry. Why are you rooting for failure and profiteering, Mr. Con? Are you one of the billionaires running one of those corporations?
Excuse me while I yawn after reading something so silly. Senate Democrats have vowed to introduce this legislation for the past 15 months. It has yet to be introduced. Senate Democrats have no idea what they’re doing in terms of controlling the schedule or the debate on most issues. They botched the stimulus (certainly not enough, as I fear we’ll come to find), they botched health care legislation (which turned into a massive health insurance giveaway), they botched climate and energy (the House has been done with their bill for almost a year now) and they’ve botched immigration (I don’t think it’s the leading issue of our time, but they certainly allowed racist Arizonans to decide when it was going to be handled).
So when I read the Senate Democrats are planning on introducing their climate and energy legislation this Wednesday, after last Monday’s false start thanks to Arizona, consider me underwhelmed. The American people by large numbers wanted something, anything to happen with regard to health care. Those numbers don’t exist for climate and energy legislation, despite the obviously larger degree of necessity for a 21st century policy approach. What I think that means is there won’t be 60 votes to stop the pathetic batch of losers known as the Senate Cons from stopping everything from moving forward. The Cons think they need to move even further toward the political fringe because a minute number of over-spoken, wealthy white men have managed to convince the corporate media that they’re more politically important than demonstrable majorities of the rest of America.
If Democrats cannot introduce and pass progressive climate and energy legislation while they control historic majorities in the House and Senate while also controlling the White House, it won’t happen any time soon. By the time it does, critical tipping points will have been handily passed and any future actions taken will be more expensive and less effective than if they had been passed in 2009 or 2010.
Because here’s what the entire topic boils down to: the climate doesn’t care what kind of political support climate legislation enjoys in any country. The climate is a physical process that is responding to our forcing more than it is responding to natural forcing. It will do what it will do. We can push it even further out of the balance it was in for most of past few hundred thousand years or we can stop forcing it and allow it to regain an equilibrium more suitable for the current variety of life on this planet.
Seriously, the Cons truly are sickos. I hesitate to call them people, given news like this (emphasis mine):
One of the laws headed to the [Oklahoma] governor would require doctors to use a vaginal probe in cases where it would provide a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound. Doctors have said this is usually the case early in pregnancies, when most abortions are done.
The Cons are clearly confused. Are they for more government or less? Because this is the government getting involved in health care decisions, which those same Cons screamed about for over a year. This is simply more proof that none of the health care debate was actually about an honest disagreement; it was about objecting to anything the half-black President of the U.S. said he wanted.
This is why few Americans are taking the teabaggers seriously. They push for stupid laws that defy what they themselves say they want. It’s too much to ask them to make sense – it’s clearly a skill that is simply beyond them.
The worst thing is they want to shove their insane version of reality down the rest of our throats via the government they claim to hate so much.
Activists are disappointed (to put it lightly) that health insurance legislation, and not health care reform, passed after a year of intense debate and discussion at the highest levels of government. A few solidly progressive items made it through the process; many more did not. Among those that did not is a public option, to say nothing of single-payer.
Flying somewhat below the back-and-forth arguments of whether or not a public option should have been a part of the legislation and what form it might or might not take is an effort that should be lauded. Rep. Alan Grayson (D,FL-08) has a piece of legislation that accomplishes many progressive goals: H.R. 4789, the “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act”. Rep. Grayson has done what many activists wish our elected officials would do: show some leadership.
H.R. 4789 has been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee. It has already garnered 80 co-sponsors. In answer to complaints in the Colorado blogosphere, I would point out that both Rep. Jared Polis (D,CO-02) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D,CO-01) are among those co-sponsors. Notably, Rep. Polis was an original co-sponsor, another sign of progressive leadership.
This likely isn’t going to be the sole effort to keep the public option discussion going as we move forward. However, it is concrete and it is available to us right now. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has a tool up so people can ask their Representatives to join as a co-sponsor to the bill. While CO-01 and CO-02 have been taken care of, there are plenty of other representatives who could sign on and I’m sure we all have friends and family in other states to point this to. I am unaware of similar action coming out from the Senate. It would be refreshing to see a Senator present something fashioned closely to H.R. 4789.
The corporate media fell over themselves producing wall-to-wall coverage of anything Tea Party related starting last August. Despite being able to only gather a few hundred people at any single gathering, despite the supposed grass-roots outrage over the health legislation in Congress, the corporate media couldn’t cover the story enough. They had no platform, only mindless rage directed at any number of targets supplied by their behind-the-scenes corporate organizers.
What happens when thousands of real grass-roots activists gather, in Washington D.C. no less, to protest against health insurance lobbyists and executives? Next to no corporate media coverage. Even a supposed paragon of liberal media like MSNBC has no front-page articles this afternoon about today’s rally.
The anger from those fed up with our broken health care system is real; it is pervasive. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if this rally, or any other rally like it, goes uncovered by the corporate media. True grass-roots activists will continue to demand change and take action when and where it is needed. The system will be changed. We will change it.
Given the resounding lack of corporate media coverage, I haven’t been able to answer the first question that came to mind when I saw the article: how diverse was this crowd? Was it more diverse than the near-absolute all-white folks showing up for Tea Party gatherings? I’m willing to bet it was.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care — admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada’s [developing] single-payer system.
After fear-mongering about the health insurance legislation in 2009, going so far as to lie that the government would have “death panels”, it finally comes to light that Sarah Palin used the Canadian health care system instead of the American system available to her in Alaska. The 1960′s version of Canada’s health care system wasn’t the same as it is today – a single payer system – but it was on the path toward today’s system. It wasn’t the American system; it wasn’t the mythological “free-market” system that Palin today worships so fervently.
