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August 12, 2009
As Health-Care Debate Rages, Obama Takes to the Stump
By JIM RUTENBERG and JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — President Obama traveled to New Hampshire on Tuesday to try to defuse fears about his plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system, an issue at the center of one of the fiercest public-policy debates in decades.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum also weighed in and tried to calm angry and worried constituents as the president prepared for the early afternoon “town meeting.” Their efforts are part of a campaign to fight questionable but potentially damaging charges that the president’s vision would inevitably lead to “socialized medicine,” “rationed care” and even forced euthanasia for the elderly.
In introducing a Web site to defend the president’s proposals, White House officials were tacitly acknowledging a difficult reality: they are suddenly at risk of losing control of the public debate over a signature issue for Mr. Obama and are now playing defense in a way they have not since last year’s campaign.
Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent who is one of the most liberal members in either House, said on Tuesday that “the Republicans are the party of do-nothingism, and because of them it is very hard to move forward.”
But Mr. Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC that “frankly, the Democrats have not handled this as clearly and effectively as they might have.”
A different perspective was offered by Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican far to the right of Mr. Sanders. Mr. King said it was quite understandable that many Americans are not enthusiastic about “the radical type of reform that President Obama’s talking about.”
The health care system should be changed “incrementally” rather than by major surgery, Mr. King said in another interview on MSNBC. The congressman said he thought the White House had made a tactical error in its approach on health care. “It may not be perfect,” he said, conceding that Americans “may have problems with it.”
“But it’s not the rabid-type issue that had to be solved by Aug. 1 of this year, the way President Obama was saying,” Mr. King said.
And Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a Republican-turned-Democrat, faced a crowd of emotional constituents in Lebanon, Pa. One participant drew loud applause when he said illegal immigrants should not be covered (Mr. Specter agreed), and another complained that the legislation was as complicated “as a Russian novel.”
Mr. Specter said the federal government has a “social compact” with the American people to “take care of people who need some help.” He pledged again not to vote for something that would add to the budget deficit, and he tried to reassure the crowd that people who are happy with their present health insurance do not have to worry about losing it.
“So far, no bill has passed the Congress,” Mr. Specter noted. “In the House of Representatives, five committees have passed bills, but the House has not passed a bill. In the Senate, we’re still working on a bill, trying to get bipartisanship.”
“I know the American people are sick and tired of Republicans and Democrats fighting, and the American people would like to see some bipartisanship and coming together in the public interest,” the senator said, in an appeal for calm that was not entirely successful.
President Obama, speaking at a summit of North American leaders in Mexico on Monday, sounded an optimistic note, predicting that “the American people are going to be glad that we acted to change an unsustainable system so that more people have coverage.”
But aides to Mr. Obama said the rapidly escalating threat to his health care plans had led him to order them to come up with a crisper message.
And Democratic Party officials enlisted in the fight by the White House acknowledged in interviews that the growing intensity of the opposition to the president’s health care plans — within the last week likened on talk radio to something out of Hitler’s Germany, lampooned by protesters at Congressional town-hall-style meetings and vilified in television commercials — had caught them off guard and forced them to begin an August counteroffensive.
In the process, the administration has had a harder time getting across the themes it wanted to strike in this period: that the current system is unsustainable and that Mr. Obama’s plan holds concrete benefits for people who already have health insurance as well as for those who do not.
“We all had a good sense that some of this was going to take place,” said Brad Woodhouse, the communications director for the Democratic National Committee. “To be fair, I think we were probably a little surprised — just a little — at the use of swastikas and the comparisons to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich that even Rush Limbaugh has fanned the flames on. And we were a little surprised at the mob mentality.” (Mr. Woodhouse’s use of the phrase “mob mentality” was itself part of the Democratic effort to paint opponents speaking out against the plan as part of an unruly but organized effort.)
For some of Mr. Obama’s supporters, the newly galvanized opposition to his proposed policies provided a troubling flashback to the successful effort to stop President Bill Clinton’s similarly ambitious plans 16 years ago — a fight Mr. Obama’s aides had studied carefully to avoid making the same fatal mistakes.
White House officials say such fears are unwarranted, arguing that the conservative protests are getting outsize coverage on cable news. “Don’t associate loud with effective,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview, adding that he detected no anxiety from supportive lawmakers in politically vulnerable districts. “What is coming across is a lot of noise and a lot of heat without a lot of light.”
And White House officials say their August counteroffensive is a break from the Clinton approach, which is now viewed as having failed to adequately address critics.
Mr. Obama will take the lead this week as he continues a series of public meetings to counter the opposition, events White House officials hope will offer a high-profile opportunity to confront and rebut critics.
As part of the effort, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the House majority leader, wrote an opinion article in USA Today on Monday calling conservative protests at Congressional town-hall-style meetings “un-American” for “drowning out opposing views.” (That prompted a swift rebuke from the House minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner, among other Republicans.)
New television commercials disputing the conservative attacks are in the works, Mr. Woodhouse said, and allied members of Congress have been sent home for the August break with a set of poll-tested talking points intended to shift the focus to the administration’s advertised benefits of the plan from the scary situations opponents have laid out.
“There’s a whole set of rumors that the old playbook would tell you not to do anything about because you draw attention,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director. “The lesson we’ve learned is you ignore these rumors at your peril, and the right answer is to take them head on in as big a way as possible.”
It was only weeks ago that Mr. Obama was pressing both the House and the Senate to complete work on their versions of health legislation before recessing for the summer, a goal that went unmet as divisions erupted among Democrats as well as between the two parties.
After getting much of what he wanted on high-risk initiatives like the economic stimulus package and bailouts of banks and auto companies, Mr. Obama had yet to face the full force of conservative opposition to his policies. Some supporters now wonder whether his earlier glide path left him unprepared for the sudden surge of opposition from conservative groups, which have found a rallying point on health care.
“The expectation was that things have gotten so bad in the last 16 years that there would be consensus on the need to act this time,” said Howard Paster, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief lobbyist in 1993. “That was a mistake, that assumption.”
Mr. Obama’s team won early, high marks for diverging from the Clinton approach, specifically by emphasizing the need to control costs and improve coverage for those who are already insured instead of making the same moral-duty argument Mr. Clinton had about the need to cover the uninsured.
Yet once Congress started filling in the details this summer and its analysts began pricing the House and Senate packages, the estimates of the government’s cost caused sticker shock again.
And once again that drew taxpayers’ attention to the main reason for those costs: covering the uninsured, through more Medicaid spending and subsidies for people to buy insurance and small businesses to provide it.
That helped conservatives who had been struggling to gain traction on health care to speak to a constituency that has managed to gain significant anti-Obama attention this year, the fiscally hawkish “tea party” activists opposed to the president’s spending. They have dismissed Mr. Obama’s promises that his plan will be fully paid for through offsetting spending cuts or increased taxes, and have cast the plan as a costly takeover of health care by the government.
“I think the combination of spending a trillion dollars that we don’t have and another rushed process really triggered this,” said Matt Kibbe, the president of the conservative group FreedomWorks. “People started paying attention.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/he...ef=global-home
personally, i think the quality of the "debate" is a good indication of just how degenerated american "democracy" has become.
i find it depressing, like i'm watching the richard bey show---you know, the talk show that was amongst the worst of them but which tried to embrace it's horrific content by making fun of itself.
seems to me that the issue has been a bit bungled by the obama administration in that they've not been clear enough about the plan itself. what they seem to be pitching mostly is that "we have to do something"
the idea of floating this as a consensus building basis in a context that's been hobbled in terms of substantive debate by not only the conservative media apparatus, but by the entire spectrum of commerically-dominated mass media, is a bad idea.
as for the opposition to the plan, so far they seem to me to oppose it mostly because it gives them something to mobilize their demographic around, so for it's own sake.
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