Brass Knuckles

The administration and the media are either tone-deaf, ignorant or are on the offensive again.  The narrative in the press is that Republicans are willfully blocking reform for political gain, and the uninsured are going to be suffering as a result.  In other words, conservatives are heartless monsters that would through the underclass into the fiery pits of hell for a political win over Obama.

Fine - try to lay it off as a crass political move by the largely irelevant and toothless Republican party, but run the risk of alienating that  vocal majority of everyday Americans that showed up to the townhall meetings and let their congressbots know how they felt.  Painting them as insurance company shills didn’t work out so was as a PR gambit, and is an even worse strategy for those whom may want to be reelected; those people are constituents, live in the communities of the district and are known by their neighbors. All over America, there were regular people thinking to themselves, “…if that’s what they think of those people at those meetings that sound like me, look like me and think like me, what must they think about me?”.  The Democrats and their media friends, however,  see Obama’s failure to rally support for nationalized health care as a classic PR/advertising issue – he’s just not getting his message out there…

Here’s a great article from Politico titled “Experts on rewriting the W.H. script”  that beautifully illustrates my point.  It’s an interview of  ad and Hollywood executives who offer their view of how Obama should sell the Obamacare package:

David Mixner, a longtime Democratic activist and a writer with two screenplays to his credit, recommends a straightforward drama: “A hardworking American family who has a young sick child, who has done everything right, suddenly sees their life upended, because of a lack of health insurance, or technicalities in their health insurance,” he says.

“To me, [the message is] real simple: We can no longer have Americans lose everything they’ve ever worked for because they’re sick. And this stops it,” he says. “And I don’t know why we’ve strayed from that in some kind of zoopgobbledygook that no one understands.”

Attie agrees and expresses similar frustration with the Democrats’ failure to assert their own message.

“That we’ve become the pro-death party when they want to leave 45 million people uninsured is insane,” he says. “Their movie is the one where everyone dies in the end. Theirs is the slasher film, and ours is the heartwarming family drama.”

So what would a screenplay that made that argument look like? “It’s a story of an average American family facing all kinds of medical bills they can’t pay, health problems they can’t treat, medications they can’t buy and a knight in shining armor named Barack Obama comes along, and they all live happily ever after,” Attie says. “You think it’s going to be a tragedy, and it isn’t.”

Others argue that the opposition’s message has an edge-of-the seat urgency that requires more of a blockbuster response.

“There’s passion on the other side, and I don’t hear passion on the side of reform, and that’s maddening to me,” says Trey Ellis, a screenwriter and novelist whose credits include the HBO film “The Tuskegee Airmen,” and who blogs about politics for the Huffington Post.

Here’s where they and the whole Democratic establishment miss their mark: it’s not that we don’t want health care reform, or that we don’t want low-cost  health insurance for those who can’t afford it, we just don’t want the government to do it.   Many of us have traveled overseas or have family and friends overseas.  No matter how you try to sell it, the word is out about government-run health care.  Up until recently, the VA (and DOD) health care was held up as a shining example of how the Bush administration neglected veterans. Now, not even a year later, it’s a model health care system?  We hear examples of how great Medicare is at cutting costs, but many of us are either in the Medicare system or have loved ones being abused by this system.  Cut costs by cutting payments to providers, and you automatically cut back service.  And if Medicare is truly the cat’s meow, why the need for supplemental private plans, and why the marked correlation between the quality of the supplement and the quality and breadth of coverage?

The issue is not that we don’t want our friends and families in unfortunate circumstances covered; my father owned a small pharmacy in a small dusty West Texas town during the Carter administration and went bust by extending “credit” to families that couldn’t afford their medicine and couldn’t wait for government approval for their treatment.  The real issue is why we need to go national when we could literally pay the permiums for the policy on every uninsured American and pay for the whole thing through tort reform, tax credits to businesses that pay premiums for bottom tier employees, and other creative means that would take a little thinking.  I personally would rather have my benefits taxes as income than submit to government healthcare.  There’s room for debate and conversation, but not if the president and congressional leaders mule-headedly stick to their plan to nationalize the health insurance and delivery system.

Here’s the bottom line: if they can’t even grant us the basic humanity of understanding that we are real people with real concerns about government health care and not two-dimensional cartoon villains, then the debate really is over, and good luck to the moderate Democrats who are being sacrificed to pass this pig of a program.

Same with the president addressing my schoolchildren.  Can you really blame us for wanting to preview the speech before he gave it?  This man is the single most partisan president in my lifetime, a man who has appointed advisors who have no problem publically stating that Republicans are “assholes“.   Why would I not want to vet the speech?  Then, after you read the speech and see no harm, you get this suggested lesson plan for the teachers  from the administration that includes the following:

• Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?
• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.

 This lesson plan wasn’t as widely distributed by the media as the speech was – I heard about it on the Joe Pags radio show here in Houston and found it on his website here.  Good job, Joe Pags.

To me, the president is so far coming off as a smooth, respectful, well manned, well heeled but horny teenage boy.  He’s smooth and respectful, but he definitely  has an agenda and is basically doing anything he can to help his date out of that hot, itchy, tight sweater.