Most of the media buzz about bipartisanship, or rather the lack thereof, has focused on criticizing the Democrats for not reaching out to their adversaries, while giving the Republicans a free ride regarding their intransigence. Yet, during the last decade or so, a tally of votes in congress would almost certainly show that a lot more Democrats have voted for legislation sponsored by Republicans than vice-versa.
Grudgingly, you have to give the Republicans an “A” for party discipline, which is another way of saying the modern GOP has become a party of mostly inflexible ideologues. But there are some signs that, maybe, just maybe, the ranks are begining to break a bit, at least on the issue of health care reform. In today’s WaPo, for example, Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly have an article, “Reform Gets Conditional GOP Support,” noting

And in the past two days, former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist; George W. Bush health and human services secretary Tommy G. Thompson and Medicare chief Mark McClellan; California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — a Republican turned independent — have all spoken favorably of overhauling the nation’s health-care system, if couched with plenty of caveats regarding the details.
The White House lobbying campaign was aimed, in part, at the one Republican who has indicated she may vote for reform legislation, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), and she said Tuesday that she hopes the comments from her GOP colleagues will resonate.

Give a listen to Bill Frist, who is a surgeon, pretty much endorsing a triggered public option with ‘local control’ in this CNN clip. Even at (gasp) Fox News, there are stirrings of sanity towards health care reform, as anchor Shep Smith steps up to shred Republican Senator John Barrasso (WY) for his knee-jerk opposition to the public option in this surprising clip at TPM.
In her article at Daily Kos, “Not All Republicans Are on the Train to Crazy Town,” McJoan adds former Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker and former GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole to the pro-reform list, wondering if,

Maybe it’s their message to their folks on the Hill that, while there may be short term gain with keeping the base riled up for 2010, ending up on the wrong side of history on this debate could have really damaging long term consequences….There’s nothing radical about healthcare reform, and I’d take it a step further to say there’s nothing radical about a robust public option. We’ve already got one, in the form of Medicare. Hell, we’ve already got the most “radical” form of healtcare–single payer–in America in the form of the VA system. That “radical” policy position was rejected before the debate even began, and the robust public option has been the reasonable compromise from the get-go in this debate.
Healthcare reform: the new mainstream.

Granted this is small ‘taters, considering that only Snowe has an actual vote to cast on health care reform legislation. But could it be that Republicans are starting to hear from their health care industry supporters, who are begining to think that a triggered public option may actually be their best hope for delaying the dreaded single payer system?

As our staff report below indicates, it’s looking very good for a favorable Senate Finance Committee report of the health care reform legislation this week. The Senate floor vote later on is more of a concern. The central question pre-occupying Senate-watchers and progressive health reform advocates alike is, what kind of public option, if any, is taking shape?
The answer to that question depends on the consensus-building skills of the white house and the willingness of a half-dozen or so key Senators, who have put their concerns out there, loud and clear, and who can not be expected to roll over without some face-saving concessions. They include:

Senator Ron Wyden (OR) wants much broader access to a ‘health exchange’ marketplace;
Senator Blanche Lincoln (AR) wants stronger cost-cutting measures so she can convince her middle-class constituents that they are not going to get saddled with tax hikes.
Republican Senator Olympia Snowe won’t vote for anything that even smells like a ‘public option’ without a ‘trigger’ mechanism of some kind;
Senator Maria Cantwell (WA) and Sen. Tom Carper (DE) want to localize the ‘public option’ by making it a state elective;
Senator Bill Nelson is mostly concerned about seniors, who are a large component of his FL constituency, and who are nervous about changes in the popular ‘Medicare Advantage’ programs.

It’s not hard to imagine a range of deals to make these six adequately happy. They have to be able to go back to their constituents and say in effect, “See, all that fussing I was doing has helped get changes in the reform package that address your concerns.” President Obama and his staff are working overtime to help make this doable.
Cantwell and Carper have already gotten an amendment supporting a public-private hybrid state approach passed in the Senate Finance Committee. Some form of it will have to survive the floor votes and reconciliation stages to keep them on board.
Wyden’s main concern is that access to health exchanges ought not be limited to those who can’t get employer-based coverage. He feels strongly that it is a critical element of cost-cutting, and forcing private providers to be competitve. Sounds about right to me.
As for Snowe, perhaps a ‘hair trigger’ that will enable her to say to her constituents, “This will protect the private insurers from cut-throat government insurance,” will be enough to make her comfortable with the package and still be acceptable to ‘robust’ public option advocates like WV Sen. Jay Rockefeller.
My guess is that Sen. Lincoln is the hardest to please, since she is the only Dem who voted against the Cantwell amendment in the Finance Committee. She has been hanging tough about cost-cutting and opposing tax hikes, and she is not alone, backed by several other moderate Democrats who share her views in varying extent, including Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Debby Stabenow, Joseph Lieberman and Claire McCaskill, among others. Convincing moderate-conservative constituents that major government reforms are not going to jack up their taxes has always been a very tough sell. Satisfying Lincoln and like-minded Senators is the white house’s most difficult challenge.
All of these Senators are aware that nation-wide public opinion favors some kind of a public option. In September, The Kaiser Family Foundation’s health care poll found that 57% of Americans want “public health insurance option similar to Medicare.” As Democratic strategist Paul Begala said, quoted in an article in today’s L.A. Times by Noam Levy and Janet Hook, “One of the most consistently popular ideas in the healthcare debate is the public option, more popular than health reform generally…”It’s good politics.”
The Administration’s best hole card, however, is that no one Senator wants to be the spoiler who gets lambasted for killing reform prospects that could save the lives of countless thousands during the next few years. Yet, understandably, none are willing to go back to their constituents empty-handed. In between these two fears there is an array of possible compromises, concessions and deals that everyone can live with. The great hope is that Team Obama can find the balances that can get to 60.

If you haven’t been following the dust-up over Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) take-down of the GOP health care “plan,” do check out this clip, posted by Open Left‘s Adam Green. Grayson responds con brio to GOP outrage over his recent remarks saying “the Republican plan is don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
Natch, the Republicans got all hufty-pufty and bent out of shape about it and are demanding an apology. But rather than cave in and grovel, Rep. Grayson is turning the brouhaha into a teachable moment, shrewdly using the media attention to hammer home the fact that the GOP really doesn’t have much of a plan, other than obstruct and crush all reform. (Also check out Grayson’s earlier refusal to apologize here). Even when CNN Situation Room anchors Gloria Bolger and Wolf Blitzer try to nail him for being uncivil, Grayson refuses to back off, and attacks the GOP’s do-nothing approach to health insurance. They try to make him eat the false equivalency of his remarks with Rep. Wilson calling the president “a liar,” but Rep. Grayson ain’t having it, and uses the opportunity to deliver another broadside against the GOP’s non-existent health care plan.
Grayson’s response to GOP protests against his remarks is instructive. First time I heard Rep. Grayson’s remarks, I winced, thinking it was a tad over the top. Dems who are squeamish about incivility and such may have problems with Grayson’s attacks. But the GOP has been getting a lot of coverage with their incivility. The way Grayson has handled it turns the controversy into a net plus. What he is doing is deploying the GOP’s media manipulation tactics to good effect, using a controversy to make a case for Democratic reform in stark contrast to Republican obstruction. It translates into more coverage for the Dem reform proposals, which have gotten squeezed off TV by various GOP bomb-throwers, like Sarah Palin. Grayson’s media strategy is don’t spend much time defending yourself; Instead, use every opportunity to attack, and that’s a good lesson for Democrats. Well-done, Rep. Grayson.

It’s a bummer that Sen. Rockefeller’s more robust public option was voted down (8-15) — almost 2-1 — in the Senate Finance Committee, despite Dems being 60 percent of the U.S. Senate. How large a majority do we need before we can pass a bill that provides a genuine public option for health insurance?
Worse, Chuck Shumer’s “level playing field” amendment, in which the public option is modified to the point where it is no drain of reimbursements from rural hospitals, also failed 10-13. (Carper and Nelson voted with the other Dems on this one.)
No doubt there will be calls for the heads of Sens. Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad, Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, who voted with the Republicans and are now being attacked around the blogosphere for being leading recipients of health insurance donations. It’s not quite fair to demonize them as rubber stamps for the Republicans, inasmuch as their most recent (’08) ADA ratings show them to be fairly progressive: Baucus 80; Carper 85; ; Conrad 90; Lincoln 80; and Nelson 75, all of which are way higher than Republican Grassley’s 25, for example. Still many, if not most, Democrats feel the public option ought to be a cornerstone of Democratic health care principles.
At this point, opponents of the public option are reduced to a version of the “slippery slope” argument, which says in essence that “even though it would not be available to all that many consumers, the public option should be opposed because it sets a bad precedent by expanding government’s role at the expense of for-profit business.” I doubt that any of the five senators actually believe this so strongly as a matter of principle; it’s more because they can get away with voting against it. Unfortunately Dems against the public option are over-represented on the Senate Finance Committee.
I understand the strong feelings of betrayal many Dems feel about the votes of the five. But after all of the splenetic denunciations of the five have been uttered, we are left with the fact that we are a Big Tent party, and tolerating differences of opinion on various legislative reforms is necessary, if we want to hold a majority. But, as Ed has persuasively argued, party discipline should kick in on cloture votes in a big way. No Democrat should be able to screw his party on a cloture vote without paying a significant price.
One thing is clear. With few exceptions, Dems have not done a great job of educating the public — to the point where these Senators would feel secure with their constituents in supporting the public option. Limp constituent education remains the Dems’ Achilles’ heel. Yes, the trifling, servile MSM bears much of the blame. But it’s still on us to do something about it.
The public option may not be toast just yet. Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery report in The Washington Post that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may insert a public option when he has to merge the Finance Committee’s bill with Senate health committee legislation (approved in July), which includes a government plan. If Reid, who Murray and Montgomery report is undecided at present, omits a public option, it’s supporters will try to amend the bill when it gets to the Senate floor. They have another shot at it during final negotiations with the House, where Speaker Pelosi, a strong public option advocate, can use her leverage to insert the provision. In addition, as Ed notes below, there is always the problematic budget reconciliation route. And who knows, a “triggered” public option amendment might gain traction before it’s all over. In any case, five Democrats ought not to be empowered to thwart the will of an overwhelming majority of Democrats — and the majority of Americans who support the public option.

For some reason the MSM doesn’t do such a hot job of telling you what you really want to know about how the votes on the public option in health care reform are lining up in the Senate Finance Committee. For that you turn to Open Left‘s Chris Bowers, who usually has the most sober assessment. Here’s Bowers on a key vote, which may happen today:

All 10 Republicans on the Finance Committee, including Olympia Snowe, are expected to vote against both public option amendments. Eight Democrats are highly likely to be yes votes: Bingaman (NM), Cantwell (WA), Kerry (MA), Menendez (NJ), Schumer (NY), Stabenow (MI), Rockefeller (WV), and Wyden (OR). It took a lot of organizing to even get that far, given the reluctance of Bingaman, Cantwell, Kerry and Wyden at times.
The other five members of the committee are difficult to predict, given that they have been all over the map on the public option this year. To pass a public option through the committee, four of the following five will need to vote in favor:
1. Baucus (MT). Should be a yes given his stated and past support for the public option. However, he could be a no to defend the draft of the bill he released, and out of a continuing belief that the public option can’t pass the Senate.
2. Carper (DE): Has said that he opposes a non-trigger public option. I expect him to vote that way, even though he is from a pretty blue state.
3. Conrad (ND): Has assiduously avoided taking a position on the public option, instead stating over and over again that there are not 60 votes for it. Well, now we finally will learn if Conrad was just talking about himself all along. As chairman of the Budget committee that will merge the Senate Finance and HELP bills, how Conrad votes will be huge. I am suspicious Conrad might vote “yes” to save face and seem like a good-faith negotiator on the co-op.
4. Lincoln (AR): Blanche Lincoln appears to have recently flipped from supporting the public option to opposing it. She really has been all over the map during this entire debate. I think about the best we can hope for is that she votes yes on the public option in committee, and yes on the cloture vote, but then no on the floor vote.
5. Nelson (FL): Perhaps more silent on the public option than any member of the Senate. He has, however, called public option supporters idiots, and said that he believes a public option can’t pass. I am not confident on this vote.

Bowers sees a 3-2 toss-up among these five as the most likely outcome, so today is a really big deal for public option advocates. On MSNBC last night, Senator Shumer said that the Senate Finance Committee may be the crucial hurdle of the legislative battle to enact health care reform with a public option, because centrist Dems are stronger in this committee than on other committees or on a floor vote.
Here’s where an organized, disciplined network of progressive citizen lobbyists could really help. Press a button and activate progressives and other public option supporters to deluge the key Senators in MT, DE, ND, AR and FL with phone calls, faxes, emails and personal visits to district offices, urging them to step up and vote for the public option. There should also be a role for out-of-state progressives who want to get involved, such as a phone bank to mobilize supporters in the targeted states. Unions, MoveOn and other organizations do this on a smaller scale from time to time. But there ought to be a larger-scale effort, perhaps a coalition, funded appropriately.
To give the MSM it’s due, the WSJ has a handy chart depicting the differences between the health care reform proposals of: Sen. Baucus; the Senate HELP Committee; the House Democratic Bill; the House Republican Outline; and President Obama. Also recommended is Ezra Klein’s informative WaPo interview with Sen. Kent Conrad

Patrick Goldstein’s L.A. Times post “Is Ken Burns a Secret Propagandist for Socialism?” presages what will probably be an outrage du jour for the Beck-Limbaugh-Hannity-etc. neo-McCarthyites. Goldstein believes the loony right will seize on the new Burns documentary series, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” as the new exhibit ‘A; revealing the cultural left’s effort to sneak socialist values into American life. As Goldstein explains, refering to James Poniewozik’s Time magazine column on the topic:

The series is actually an ingenious refutation of the popular conservative belief that big government is evil, outmoded and unnecessarily involved in ruling our lives.
Noting that the original impetus for establishing national parks came from naturalists like John Muir who were horrified to see how Niagara Falls was nearly destroyed by the greed and hucksterism of free market- loving charlatans, Poniewozik writes: “With America frothing over the role of government — Should it save banks? Should it expand health coverage? — ‘The National Parks’ makes a simple case for an idea that is wildly controversial in the year of the tea party: That we need government to do things the private sector can’t or won’t.”
In other words, the entire origin of the national park system, whose most passionate backer was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, is based on a firm belief in — Glenn Beck, cover your ears, please — government intervention to regulate an out-of-control free-enterprise system. In fact, one of the more dramatic moments in Burns’ documentary involves the battle to create a park in the Great Smoky Mountains, while logging companies bankrolled anti-park ads and were “frantically cutting the old-growth forests to extract everything they could before the land was closed to them.”

Goldstein and Poniewozik make a good point. Burns’s documentary is right on time, because it serves up a potent, inarguable reminder that big business often does have rapacious and exploitative tendencies, which in this case would leave our wilderness areas denuded of hardwoods and clean rivers. It’s not such a huge leap from there to acknowledging that health care for profit often has a similar tendency, and maybe government could help contain it. Goldstein also posts a little preview clip of the series, and some interesting pro and con comments follow his post.

My concerns about President Obama’s media blitz over-exposing him to ‘gotcha’ questions were unfounded, judging by his effectiveness on three interview programs I watched, Meet the Press (NBC), This Week (ABC) and State of the Union (CNN). He seemed more comfortable and persuasive as an interview subject now than he did as a candidate.
The formats of these three programs were one-on-one interviews with David Gregory, George Stephanopolis and John King respectively — all three of whom were even-handed enough. In addition the President was interviewed only for a portion of each program, 18 minutes, for example, on “This Week.” Although his left critics will not be happy with his flexibility in key issues like the public option, Obama did extraordinarilly-well on nearly all topics, with one exception.
The President did his homework and demonstrated an impressive grasp of the issues regarding current health care reform proposals. He didn’t bristle, calmly but firmly correcting questions based on false assumptions with a friendly spirit, and demonstrated his characteristic ‘cool’ to good effect. Equally importantly and in glaring contrast to his GOP critics, he projected the conciliatory spirit of a leader who was not a rigid ideologue.
Obama did a good job of refusing to be distracted by the efforts of interviewers to get him off on a tangential argument about race, which he called “catnip” for conflict-hungry reporters, or the fuss over ACORN which he pointed out was kind of trifling, compared to the huge issues facing America at the moment. He also called the media to account for sensationalizing debates over serious issues with side-show distractions, stating on CNN that “the easiest way” to get on CNN, FOX and other big media was to “say something rude and outrageous” and telling the MTP host that the media “encourages some of the outliers of behavior.”
He emphasized on MTP (video here) that physicians and nurses support his basic plan and Obama once again extended a bit of an olive branch to the GOP in noting that he was bucking his Party some on tort reform. Regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said he wasn’t one who supports “indefinite occupation of other countries” and that the U.S. must avoid ‘mission creep’ and stay forcused on eliminating al-Qaeda.
But the one comment that I doubt played very well among many viewers was his statement, made on all three programs, that his Administration was still doing an assessment to formulate strategy on Afghanistan. The President correctly pointed out that you don’t commit resources to any major endeavor until the strategy is determined. But he has been in office for 9 months now, and even if there are good reasons for not having his Afghanistan strategy in place, it’s a tough sell. Yes, the public knows that the situation is highly complex, but I doubt he can delay putting a strategy in place much longer without losing support at an accelerating pace.
Afghanistan notwithstanding, health care reform remains the critical issue of the hour, and I think any fair-minded evaluation would have to give him good marks in making his case in the format allotted. I doubt he lost any support in the political center. Although speechifying is still his big edge as a communicator, the President proved he can deliver his message one-on-one as good as any Democrat, and better than most. (HuffPo has video clip highlights of his media blitz.)
Perhaps one measure of President Obama’s effectiveness was how forgettable were the comments responding to his answers in the politician and media pundit circle jerks. On MTP, Rep. John Boehner parroted the conservative sound bites unconvincingly, and Sen. Lindsay Graham was only marginally less carping. The overall impression I was left with was how predictable and nitpicking were their comments. It might have been more interesting to hear responses from a panel of public health experts.

Sometimes the voting behavior of certain members of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is so far beneath contempt that it can be likened to a demented limbo dance, in which the bar is set so low that only the most reptilian of U.S. Senators dare try to slither under it. Sue Sturgis of Facing South may have found a new measure for such low-lifery in the U.S. Senate in her report “The 10 Senators who vetoed insurance protection for domestic violence survivors.” As Sturgis explains:

…Health insurance companies in a number of states and the District of Columbia are allowed by law to treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition for which they can deny individual coverage…The story was met with outrage, but it gets even worse.
The blog of the Service Employees International Union, which is pressing for health insurance reform, reports that in 2006 a Senate committee considered an amendment to the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act that would have required insurers to stop ignoring state laws that make it illegal for them to deny coverage to domestic violence survivors — and 10 Senators, all Republicans, voted against it. They were:
* Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
* Richard Burr (R-N.C.)
* John Ensign (R-Nev.)
* Mike Enzi (R-Wy.)
* Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
* Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)
* Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
* Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)
* Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
* Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

Yes, that’s right. These ten Republican Senators reportedly voted to protect the right of health insurers to deny coverage to women who have been beaten by their spouses. As Sturgis notes, Frist, a physician no less, is thankfully out of the picture. But the others are still railing away, doing what they can to stop the Democratic reform plan. If they think it’s OK for insurance companies to penalize battered women, it’s hard to imagine what kind of “reform” they would support.

President Obama’s TV blitz amounts to a declaration of all-out media war against the GOP’s efforts to obstruct health care reform with lies and distortions. Katharine Q. Seelye reports in the New York Times on the President’s historic media initiative:

For the first time ever, a president is appearing on five talk shows on a single Sunday, in quick succession — on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Univision. (To be clear: He is taping them Friday night at the White House, not sprinting from set to set on Sunday)… Collectively, those five shows reach almost 12 million people, according to Nielsen…The president is leaving no channel unchurned in his quest to convince Congress to pass a health care overhaul.

Seelye points out that Obama’s blitz “raises the ante” and “suggests he knows he needs to do something dramatic to alter the course of debate.” The risk is that the President will expose himself to tricky “gotcha” questions, which are difficult to anticipate. In addition, Obama’s strongest messaging weapon is the speech, not the television interview, in which his skills are about average among leading Democrats. Still, time is short, and he has few alternatives to using as many major TV programs as he can to help educate voters and persuade undecided Senators and House reps.
Ads, with Obama in particular, provide an edge over interviews in that they can be edited and tweaked for maximum effect. The downside is that they are expensive, while interviews cost nothing but time. Hopefully, the DNC and health reform groups are re-packaging bits of his well-received health care address to congress into TV ads, which also depict the outrageous injustices practiced by health insurance companies. Not doing so would be the equivalent of the DNC’s failure to re-package Al Gore’s excellent acceptance address at the 2000 convention, which soon disappeared unused into the ether, while his campaign ran mediocre ads. We can be certain that the health insurance industry is now preparing an ad blitz of unprecedented scale. If Dems and their supporting organizations get buried by a tidal wave of insurance industry TV ads and respond weakly, we will have only ourselves to blame.
The optimistic scenario is that Obama handles the interviews exceptionally-well, which is certainly possible and Democrats and health reform groups run a great ad blitz that more than offsets the insurance industry effort. If these two challenges are met, it could help make the difference between victory and defeat on health care reform.
It’s probably too much to hope that a good YouTube health care reform video will go viral as did the “Yes We Can” clip, although there are some good ones available. Seelye also reports that a coalition group, Health Care for America now has budgeted $1.2 million to run an ad on nation-wide cable TV and Washington, D.C.-area television (It’s a pretty tough, but very short ad. see it here), as well as print ad in political publications. For those who like longer (about 11 minutes), tougher fare, in this video clip Keith Olbermann gets seriously medieval on specific members of congress who oppose/obstruct health reform while taking big money from the health insurance companies. Also, YouTube has dozens of video clips from Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”
The great advantage of videos and documentaries is that they can show the need for health care reform as opposed to just talking about it. The networks could do a tremendous public service that could save the lives of many simply by showing some of the better videos and documentaries about health care and the need for reform in the days ahead. It’s unlikely that network programming execs will ever have a better opportunity to do something great for their country and its people.

Those old enough to remember what the McCarthy Era felt like will recognize the re-emergence of an ugly meme in American politics: branding reforms and individuals as “Socialist.” Of course, red-baiting never really went completely away. But now it’s back in a big way. The idea here is to demonize their liberal adversaries as authoritarian, even those who are advocating the most moderately liberal of reforms.
Effective branding, as every experienced business person knows, requires repetition. And so here we go with conservative ideologues repeated demonizing of liberal supporters of health care reform as “Socialists.” Presumably the term “Communist” has been judged a little too harsh for modern meme-propagation, at least at this juncture. But the same twisted, fear-mongering psychology is at work, and if unchallenged, it could get worse.
I suspect that many, if not most of the latter-day red-baiters have no clue that there are many stable governments that have free speech, free elections and embrace what can be described as ‘Socialist’ policies. They merely parrot memes they have heard on Fox Network, Freedomworks or WorldnetDaily.Com, encouraged by GOP opinion leaders who know better.
The New York Times ‘Room for Debate’ blog is running a mini-forum on “What is Socialism 2009?,” with contributions by academics and journalists. A couple of their short essays, followed by some perceptive reader comments, illuminate the psychology behind latest round of neo-Mcarthyist Socialist-bashing.
In his essay, Andrew Hartman an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, observes:

…The degree to which conservatives invoke the specter of socialism has always been more calibrated to domestic anxieties than to foreign threats…For many, the label serves as an effective, if cynical sledgehammer. In a nation with a long history of anti-socialist sentiments, if health care reform can be associated with “socialism,” that’s good strategy.

In her contribution, The Nation Editor Katrina Vanden Heuval explains:

America’s Glenn Beck-inspired mobs would consider social democracy one and the same as socialism or communism. But there is a difference; and it is one which our history textbooks and our media have for the most part failed to fill us in on. So, now we are in a vacuum, and misinformation and mendacity fills it. At our peril. Isn’t social democracy — or call it socialism with a human face — all about a healthy and thriving public sphere in education, health care, transportation, libraries, parks, childcare? Isn’t it about government programs that improve the conditions of people’s lives? If that is socialism, then Medicare is our America variant of socialism.
We are poorer today for the divisions unleashed by those who would lash the label “socialism” around the neck of a moderately liberal president in order to cripple efforts by government to play a smart and humane role.

A commenter, Bill Hoagland adds:

When a reactionary political party has nothing positive to offer, and they desire to maintain the status quo– they can only resort to negativity. Calling someone a “Liberal” doesn’t quite have the negative connotation that they were once able to attach to it. So they label someone a “Socialist” and attack the person, or the plan. But it is nothing except ‘name calling’…

But a few Republican leaders are getting a bit worried. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, quoted in Peter Wallsten’s L.A. Times article “Some fear GOP is being carried to the extreme,” has expressed concern about “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps…you have to be aware that there’s a line where legitimate concerns begin to collapse into paranoid fantasy.”
When the problem is ignorance, as always, the best approach is education. In her CNNPolitics.com commentary, Yale professor Jennifer Klein describes one couple’s stated fears of “a socialist takeover of their health care” voiced at one of the recent town hall meetings. Klein, co-author, with Eilene Boris of “For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State,” explains in interesting historical detail how the couple’s health care with the United Mineworkers’ union, has been government-subsidized from the outset.
But Klein concludes on a cautionary note and observes,

Health care reform will derail once more if we can’t learn to talk honestly about public benefits and public goods — how they protect us from the insecurities and inequities of the market and promote genuine economic security in the face of real imbalances of economic power and resources…The only moments when health security has been achieved in America are those founded on a partnership between empowered citizens and the federal government…It’s been the American way all along.

The “Socialist” accusation is being responded to across the country by progressives favoring an expanded role for government in health care reform. Although the climate of fear is not as intense as it was during the McCarthy era, Democrats should expect the attacks for a while longer, until even lazy reporters who can’t analyze policy get tired of writing about it. The thing is to be ready for it, to have some good soundbites and brief responses that put the accusations in proper perspective, such as:

“I think real socialists would laugh at the notion that the President’s plan is anything but a modest adjustment to capitalist health care.”

or,

“Name-calling is the signature of a failed argument. They are accusing us of being “Socialist” to distract people from the weakness of their position.”

or,

“If the President’s plan is so ‘Socialist”, why are physicians organizations and pharmaceutical companies supporting it?”

After that is accomplished, we can steer the discusssion away from name-calling and back toward the impressive benefits of health reforms being proposed by Democrats.