A big part of the fight against health reform right now involves the identification of specific provisions in the House bill that are then distorted, taken out of context, or otherwise twisted to create the impression of some scary or monstrous outrage. That’s how language authorizing the payment of providers requested by patients to advise on end-of-life treatment options turned into “death panels.”
So now, via Todd Gitlin at TPM, we read a column by Mike Huckabee’s bosom buddy Chuck Norris identifying another scary provision:

It’s outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading “home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

This voluntary program becomes, in Norris’ account, a lurid “home intrusion and indoctrination” program intended to usurp parental rights, impose “progressive-secular religiously neutered” values, and probably even “encourage abortions.”
What it actually sounds like to me is the sort of prenatal and neonatal “welcome wagon” services already offered in many states, often in conjunction with private non-profit and religious organizations.
Still, put all that aside for a moment and consider this: when Norris or Sarah Palin or anyone else cherry-picks some provision in one health care reform bill and then demonizes it, do they ever make the rather obvious suggestion that said provision simply be modified or eliminated during the very long process that would lead to a bill on the president’s desk? I mean, really: the House hasn’t even passed a bill yet. The Senate Finance Committee hasn’t drafted a bill yet, and it certainly isn’t using the House committees’ bill as any sort of template. The Senate allows virtually unlimited amendment of bills. And then even after House and Senate floor action, there’s a conference committee that can and will make changes.
But no: these cherry-pickers simply demand rejection of “Obama’s plan” or the “Democrat plan;” Norris urges his readers to “write or call your representative today and protest his voting Obamacare into law.” Sure, he, like every other opponent of health reform, claims Congress is “rushing” these bills, and says we need a “truly bipartisan group that is allowed an ample amount of time to work on a compromise health care law that wouldn’t raise taxes (for anyone), regulate personal medical choices, ration health care or restrict American citizens.” But that’s another way of saying he opposes anything vaguely approaching universal health coverage. And that’s his right. But please, Chuck, kickbox this suggestion that “Obamacare” is some sort of monolithic plan full of secret agendas that is being rammed through Congress on an up-or-down vote. That is, in point of fact, a lie, which is a term I rarely apply to people’s political expressions.
There’s plenty of opportunity to change health reform provisions, and those who are shrieking about this or that provision need to stop disguising their fundamental opposition to health reform as concern about the details.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The conservative attacks on health care reform and Barack Obama’s economic plan seem to have reached a fever pitch this week. Their obsession with the topics has been matched only by the inanity of most of their critiques. Why are the conservative talking points on these issues grounded in such weak arguments? Is there something else at play here?
This reaction seemed strangely familiar as I read Matthew Yglesias’s recent post about the Christian Right’s obsession with gay marriage. As a matter of course, your average Christian Right crusader against gay marriage acts as though the issue vitally affects non-gay people: It cheapens “real” marriage and threatens the “traditional family,” they argue. Others claim that it enshrines relativistic morals and violates the religious rights of Christians. What unites most of these arguments is that they claim not to be about denying gay people their rights, but protecting non-gay people.
None of these arguments are particularly strong. And not coincidentally, if you spend much time around regular conservative folk (rather than pundits or spokesmen) who oppose gay marriage, they won’t be making them. Rather, you hear various forms of personal and Biblical condemnation of homosexuality, usually combined with outrage that these people demand legal protection for their unsavory behavior. You don’t hear this in public in part because dehumanizing gay people isn’t as generally acceptable as it used to be. But it’s still there, under the surface, and may be one of the reasons why critics of gay marriage keep fighting against gay marriage despite the ludicrous nature of their public arguments.
This may actually help explain many of the absurd conservative attacks on Obama’s economic and health care agenda. We’re painfully accustomed to hearing that Obama is herding Americans into socialism, is destroying the private-sector economy, and is determined to create a health care system that combines the bureaucracy of Great Britain with the ethics of Nazi Germany. Do the people repeating and encouraging this sort of talk really believe it?
Maybe, but there may also be something a little more direct going on in the conservative psychology. There was an interesting vignette at one of the infamous town hall meetings last week in which a disabled woman on crutches who had lost her health insurance was accosted by another woman who shouted, “I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!” amidst jeering applause from other health reform opponents. That was no more than a crude expression of what some conservative elite spokesmen have explicitly said, such as ABC’s John Stossel, who describes Obama’s plan as “a form of expensive, taxpayer-funded welfare.”
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it echoes what we heard repeatedly among angry grassroots conservatives during the 2008 campaign, particularly after the financial collapse: Irresponsible people (many of whom happen to be minorities) have wrecked the economy by taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford, and were subsequently trying to elect Obama to get themselves more welfare at the expense of good, productive people who didn’t live beyond their means. Indeed, long after welfare reform supposedly took this conservative wedge issue off the table, anger about “welfare”–as applied to mortgage relief, progressive taxes, and now health reform–has made quite a comeback. One of the most potent things about the 1980s-vintage attacks on “welfare” was that they endowed some pretty ugly emotions with self-righteousness, and even a sense of victimization, for people who felt they were being punished for being productive. It seems clear that many of Obama’s right-wing critics are motivated as much by moral judgments about the beneficiaries of his polices as by their alleged impact on the economy or the health care system.
But in the same way that it’s no longer acceptable to publicly hate on gay people, it is not terribly respectable to publicly hate the poor, to consider minorities inherently inferior, or to express indifference towards the sufferings of fellow citizens. And so instead of the woman screaming “Why should I pay for your health care?” we get a host of specious public-spirited arguments about the destruction that health care reform will inflict on us all, be they elderly Medicare beneficiaries or the middle-class mother of a disabled child.
Conservatives are hardly unique in reacting selfishly or self-righteously to political issues, or dressing up personal prejudices with public policy arguments; we all do that from time to time, and to one extent or another. But whether we are talking about gay marriage, government-backed mortgages, or health care reform, there may well be a strongly dynamic relationship right now between privately held feelings of strong disdain for the purported beneficiaries of Obama’s agenda, and some of the wilder arguments being made publicly to attack it.

Ezra Klein at the Washington Post has nicely crystallized today the frustrations involved in trying to answer some of the crazier “questions” being raised by opponents of health care reform:

[T]he questions reformers have to answer is not “when did you stop beating your wife?” It’s “what will prevent you from beating your wife?” Given that there is no such thing as a “death panel,” nor any policy provision that would establish such a thing, it is hard to explain the institutional checks that would prevent a “death panel” from coming into being. When you have to explain why your bill won’t create death panels, and what will make sure that it doesn’t, you’ve pretty much lost the argument.
The fact that an idea as loony as death panels has found even the slightest purchase in the public consciousness shows how distant the minority feels from our democracy. Members of Congress are terrified of voter backlash and industry opposition. They are leaving virtually the entire health-care system untouched. They will scuttle the bill if a rural hospital in their district doesn’t receive sufficient reimbursement or if a local device manufacturer is harmed. Yet there is a certain portion of the country that believes that Max Baucus and Mike Ross are willing to vote for death panels and defend them before their constituents in the following election.

Aside from the “what will prevent you from beating your wife?” problem, Ezra is also on target in identifying the large disconnect between the realities of how this legislation is being developed and the apparent perceptions of health reform opponents. Many reform advocates are perpetually in a state of semi-depression about the compromises being made to bring the requisite number of House Blue Dogs, plus the “Gang of Six” in the Senate, on board for any bill. Yet protesters against the “Obama plan” are telling us it’s a replica of the worst features of the British Health Service, which it doesn’t even begin to resemble, and that centrist Democrats are secretly on board with a far-left scheme. This makes much of the health reform “debate” an exercise in shadow boxing.

The continuing arguments over congressional “town hall meetings” and protests against health reform have largely focused on the relative authenticity of the protests. Are the people chanting against Obama and health reform at these events motivated by spontaneous civic-minded feelings, or were they rounded up and deployed by “astroturfing” p.r. outfits paid by health industry lobbyists? The previous post by James Vega goes into the questions of authenticity in some detail.
But I have a different question: authentic or phony, should these protests matter to Congress? We are talking, after all, about relatively small groups of people vociferously expressing a point of view (yes, some ask “questions” of their representatives, but generally of the loaded and rhetorical sort). Should these expressions be given disproportionate weight, perhaps more than, say, the party or ideology of Members of Congress, their understanding of their districts’ needs, or surveys of public opinion?
The question pretty much answers itself if you don’t start with vague notions, as many conservative commentators have been offering lately, that the protesters somehow represent the heart and soul of America, or Concerned Citizenry, or the Middle Class, or some such other abstraction. It’s particularly amusing to hear those who doubt the significance of the protests being denounced as “elitists.” What could be more “elitist” than the belief that democratic procedures should be trumped by the appearance of a few hundred highly opinionated people at a public event?
I dunno–maybe my jaundiced attitude on this subject was developed when I worked for a United States Senator back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yes, my boss held public forums pretty regularly, and yes, we carefully toted up calls and cards and letters sent from constituents on various issues of the day. But we were under zero illusion that these expressions of public opinion were necessarily representative of public opinion itself. At public events, the bane of every Member of Congress’ existence in those days were the so-called “Notch Babies,” a cohort of people born between 1917 and 1921 who were convinced they had been denied Social Security benefits that people born just before or after received. “Notch Babies” showed up at every available forum demanding financial reparations. Members and staff patiently listened to, and tried to reason with, these disgruntled citizens, with limited success. But you know what? Legislation to “fix” the “notch” was never enacted.
Elected representatives do have a responsibility to give constituents opportunities to ask them questions and express their own views, as a simple matter of accountability. But those voices should not be confused with the “voice of the people,” measured a bit more scientifically by elections, in which, as you may recall, the candidates clearly preferred by most if not all of the health reform protesters lost. This probably made them feel “disempowered” and perhaps even angry and inclined to answer that email and go out to shake fists at the Democrat Socialist representing them so badly in Congress. That’s all well and good, and any Member of Congress who can’t take heckling now and then is probably in the wrong line of work. But the idea that the chants and signs and head-counts at these highly selective events ought to sway votes on real issues is just wrong.

At a time when right-wing conspiracy theories about health care reform and the Obama administration are running rampant, there’s a much less visible development that shows, with a particularly ironic twist, how such theories can affect more mundane matters like the appointment of a distinguished academic to relatively obscure White House job.
The academic in question is Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar generally considered to be a “centrist,” and an old friend of President Obama. His appointment to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been repeatedly stalled by “holds” placed by Republican senators who are reacting to viral lobbying that suggests Sunstein is a gun-hating animal rights fanatic, mostly based on some out-of-context quotes from a 2004 book. Amanda Ripley has the story at The Daily Beast:

Asked about these arguments by senators at his May 12 nomination hearings, however, Sunstein explained that he is a strong believer in the Second Amendment, and he promised that he will not promote litigation on behalf of animals. Nevertheless, shortly after those hearings Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) put a hold on Sunstein’s nomination, citing the very concerns the nominee had addressed in his testimony. Meanwhile, sinister accusations about Sunstein’s radical left-wing agenda were whipping around the blogosphere, fueled by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck on Fox News.

After a meeting with Sunstein, Chambliss released his hold, but two new ones have been issued, one by John Cornyn (subsequently released) and now a second by an anonymous senator.
The ironic twist in this case, as Ripley explains, is that Sunstein is the author of a well-known and very recent book about partisan and ideological conspiracy theories, entitled Going to Extremes. Sunstein’s hypothesis is that the “echo chamber” effect whereby ideologues associate and listen to like-minded people rather than to others tends to make objectively ludicrous assertions about “the enemy” subjectively credible.
That seems to be the case with the assertion that Obama chose Sunstein in order to help take away everybody’s guns and let Fido go to court. Thanks to the peculiarities of Senate procedures, while allow confirmable appointments to be held up by one senator, right-wing theories about this man they don’t really know anything about could eventually cost him a job for which he is abundantly qualified.

So after her quickly infamous Facebook post about health reform creating “death panels” that would threaten the life of her son, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is now urging reform opponents to avoid “tactics that can be accused of leading to intimidation or harassment.”
That’s nice, though tactical tips-from-the-coach hardly amount to a heart-felt repudiation of goon squad activity. But I have a much better idea for Ms. Palin: stop making up (or borrowing from Michele Bachmann) scary stuff about health reform, and maybe fewer people will behave hysterically.
This could be difficult for Palin, with her deep roots in the Right-to-Life movement, where Nazi analogies are thrown around very casually. But “civility” in politics isn’t just a tactic; it’s an attitude which begins with the assumption that one’s opponents are well-meaning Americans, not cartoon character villains.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Of all the back-and-forth recriminations about the ongling shriekfests at congressional “town hall meetings,” the most maddening is that offered on Friday by the oh-so-eloquent wordsmith Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. According to Noonan, arrogant Democrats are insisting on health care reform despite its obvious absurdity at a time like this, thereby “terrifying” citizens into protests against the outrage. And it’s all a tragic accident due to a quirk of last year’s Democratic primaries:

When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

Noonan seems to be unaware that health care was a priority initiative for every major Democratic presidential candidate throughout the last two election cycles. And far from being a strange preoccupation this year, Obama and congressional Democrats have emphasized health care reform not in the face of economic concerns, but because of them, given the highly damaging economic effects of ever-rising health care costs and steadily eroding coverage.
But this basic misstatement of the landscape by Noonan is nothing compared to her assumption that screaming crowds of protestors at town hall meetings are purely representative of a justifiably frightened public:

[Y]ou can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

How does Noonan know this? Has she gone out with a clipboard and determined these crowds are composed of a cross-section of the American citizenry? “Astroturfing” aside, is she really unaware of the overlap between these protests and the vastly unrepresentative “tea party movement?” When similar crowds of “passionate” people fearing “loss” expressed rage during the campaign about Obama’s “redistributionist” tax proposals, should he have just conceded the election to McCain? You’d guess so, since Noonan’s prescription for Obama is to stop scaring these poor, oppressed people and give up on health reform.
Peggy Noonan is not that stupid. If Obama were promoting something she supported, there’s zero chance she would be asking him to surrender in the face of intimidation by small groups of people who may well just be “passionate” because they never wanted him elected in the first place.