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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

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A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

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The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

Read the Memo.

Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

Read the Memo.

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

Read the Memo.

Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

Read the Memo.

The Daily Strategist

March 28, 2024

Teixeira: Obama, Plans Draw Broad Support

In his latest “Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages, Ruy Teixeira has good news for President Obama and his agenda:

There’s no doubt about it: President Barack Obama is quite popular with the American public. As a recent report from Gallup notes: “Nearly all major demographic categories of Americans are pleased with his job performance.” As just one example of this broad support, Obama receives 76 percent approval among those in households with less than $24,000 in income, 62 percent approval in households from $24,000 to $59,999, 57 percent approval in households from $60,000 to $89,999 and 61 percent approval in household with over $90,000 in income.

Teixeira goes on to note that a new NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll finds high approval ratings for a range of the President’s policies addressing education, diplomacy, health insurance and energy.


The Other Shoe Dropping On State Stimulus Money

Back when the economic stimulus bill was being debated, and reshaped, in the U.S. Senate, a few of us drew attention to the fairly radical cutbacks in “flexible” state money being demanded by the Nelson-Collins group that held the fate of the legislation in their hands. The idea for the flexible funds was to keep states from undercutting the national stimulus effort by cutting back services and laying off employees.
In the end, the overall “state fiscal stabilization fund” in the stimulus legislation was cut from the $79 billion (over two years) in the House bill to $53 billion; but the truly flexible portion of the fund that could be used by states for non-education as well as education purposes dropped from $25 billion to $8 billion. (If you want to understand the complicated math and confusing terminology of these developments, check out my posts here and here.)
So: now the other shoe is dropping, and as a report in the Washington Post today shows, states are indeed cutting back services and employees, in some cases drastically.
When asked if “centrist” senators regretted the cutbacks in flexible state money, a spokesman for Ben Nelson told the Post:
“This is a stimulus bill, not a state bailout bill,” he said. “While the economic recovery bill will undoubtedly help states with their budgets and employment, the primary intent was to stimulate the economy.”
You’d think that Nelson, a former governor, would understand how state cutbacks and layoffs would negatively effect efforts to “stimulate the economy,” but I guess not.
Perhaps the best defense that can be made of the flexible funding cutbacks is that some states are not exactly showing very good judgment in using what little money they got outside Medicaid. In Missouri, Republican legislators are trying to use a big chunk of stimulus money for a highly regressive tax cut. One of these solons told the Associated Press: “This is real stimulus. This is what will make our country turn around — give the dollars back to the taxpayers, give the power to the people.” Since the latest tax shenanigans in Missouri are part of a broader GOP effort there to repeal the income tax and impose higher sales taxes, it’s pretty clear which “people” they want to empower.


Steele’s Two-Cushion Scratch Shot

Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the Republican National Committee continues to lurch from disaster to disaster. Even though he’s scaled back his media appearances, the ones he’s making aren’t helping matters. Late last week, he was on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and offered the following thoughts when asked by a caller if Mitt Romney had been denied the 2008 GOP presidential nomination by “liberals” and “the media” who were pulling wires for John McCain:

“Remember, it was the base that rejected Mitt because of his switch on pro-life, from pro-choice to pro-life,” Steele told the caller. “It was the base that rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism. It was the base that rejected Mitt because they thought he was back and forth and waffling on those very economic issues you’re talking about.”
“So, I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but before we even got to a primary vote, the base had made very clear they had issues with Mitt because if they didn’t, he would have defeated John McCain in those primaries in which he lost,” Steele concluded.

As Michelle Cottle of TNR’s The Plank observed today:

[B]y trying to make a simple, completely accurate observation about last year’s presidential primary, he managed simultaneously to pick a fight with Mitt Romney and tar the party’s base as a bunch of anti-Mormon bigots.
When oh when will someone put this man out of his misery?

Yep, Steele’s comments were something of a two-cushion scratch shot. But the maddening thing for Republicans is that they can’t dump him as chairman without courting the impression that they are bigots or small-tent types themselves. The chairman-in-waiting, South Carolina’s Katon Dawson (he of the recent memebership in a segregated country club) wouldn’t help much. One conservative blogger has suggested a very different name for
Steele’s replacement: a guy named Norm Coleman. If that idea has legs, it’s no wonder that Steele said “No, hell no!” to the suggestion that Coleman give up his guerilla legal challenge to his retirement from the U.S. Senate.


Fading Culture Wars a Downer for GOP

Evidence continues to mount that the American public is becoming more tolerant of same-sex marriage and immigration — two of the hot button ‘cultural’ issues the Republicans hoped to exploit in upcoming elections. As Ruy Teixeira reports in a recent edition of his “Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages,

…Consider these data on gay marriage—perhaps the most contentious of all cultural issues—from the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. In that poll for the first time a plurality of Americans (49-46) endorsed the idea that it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married. And support for legalizing gay marriage was even higher among 18- to 29-year-olds (66 percent). This suggests that we will see even stronger public support for gay marriage as more members of the rising Millennial generation enter adulthood in years to come.

And,

…In the same poll, 61 percent supported a program to allow illegal immigrants now living in the United States to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements, compared to 35 percent who opposed such a program. That’s up from a narrow 49-46 split in favor back in December of 2007. And, as with gay marriage, support for immigration reform is even stronger among young Americans at 73 percent.

Absent the myriad distractions presented by cultural classhes of earlier years, Teixeira notes, the GOP will be forced to persuade voters that their policies “actually work and will solve people’s problems….Given that they have little to offer except retreads from the disastrous Bush administration, it could be a tough sell.”


Time To Bury “Judicial Activism” Slur

In the run-up to an expected confirmation fight over President Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment, Republicans are already warming up their tired old rhetoric attacking “judicial activism” as an unacceptable quality for judges. A perfect dissection of the emptiness of this term has been offered up at Politico by Keenan Kmiec, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, and thus presumably not a wild-eyed liberal:

Complaints about judicial activism have plagued Supreme Court confirmation hearings for decades. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor fielded dozens of questions on judicial activism in 1981. Justice Stephen Breyer was urged to “resist the siren calls of judicial activism” in 1994. The term appears 56 times in the record of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings, and it seemed omnipresent at the Roberts and Alito hearings.
But what does “judicial activism” mean? To borrow from Justice Antonin Scalia, it often “doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t say whether you’re going to adopt the incorporation doctrine, whether you believe in substantive due process. It’s totally imprecise. It’s just nothing but fluff.”
Without context or a clear definition, a charge of judicial activism is an empty epithet, the legal equivalent of calling someone a jerk.

Kmiec goes on to look at several issues that lurk below the surface of charges of “judicial activism,” including deference to legislative decisions, respect for judicial precedent, and various approaches to the interpretation of both constitutional and statutory texts. But the fundamental issue of a putative Justice’s judicial philosophy is not often captured by talk of “activism:”

There are about as many theories of constitutional interpretation as there are judges. The current Supreme Court includes self-described “originalists,” “minimalists” and proponents of “active liberty,” to name a few….
Understanding a nominee’s judicial philosophy is hard work, but it should be the goal of the confirmation process. Amorphous charges of “judicial activism” score cheap political points, but they have no place in a serious confirmation debate. Let’s banish the term or at least use it carefully.

Sounds like a very good idea, but don’t hold your breath for Republicans to agree.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s First Read has come up with what it calls a “working short-list” of six for Obama’s SCOTUS pick:

The co-frontrunners (in no particular order): Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Merrick Garland of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Granholm and Napolitano are a bit of a surprise for so narrow a “short-list,” but it should be noted that they both served as Attorney General of their states. Napolitano knows a little about confirmation fights, too. As Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Napolitano was an attorney representing Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation saga.


2008 Without John Edwards

The chattering classes have been engaged over the last couple weeks in one of those debates over hypotheticals that only political junkies–and perhaps fans of “alternative history”–could care about: what would have happened in the presidential nominating process if John Edwards had gone the other way on running for president under the threat of exposure of his extramarital affair?
Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 pollster and “strategist,” Mark Penn, has looked for evidence that his candidate would have benefited from a one-on-one competition with Barack Obama, particularly in Iowa. As Mark Blumenthal has established by looking at polling data from Iowa, that’s not terribly plausible, since Obama was decisively the second-choice candidate among Iowa Edwards supporters. There was some pretty strong data early on suggesting that HRC and Edwards were both drawing from similar demographic categories–particularly older and more blue-collar voters–and Penn seems to think that the demographic-driven nature of the Obama-Clinton competition might have taken hold earlier without Edwards in the race. But it must be remembered that Obama’s difficulties in attracting “traditional” Democratic voters never really materialized in the upper midwest.
I do have to disagree for once with the excellent Mr. Blumenthal about one thing: his contention that the “least plausible” Edwards withdrawal scenario was between Iowa and New Hampshire. Makes perfect sense to me that Edwards might have gambled on keeping his secret until his very best state had voted, and then packed it once he lost, eliminating any realistic chance that he’d win the nomination. In any event, as Blumenthal shows, this scenario would have almost definitely produced an Obama win in NH, and quite possibly, an early end to the nomination contest. Would that have been good for Obama? The conventional wisdom is that an early win is always better, and for all the talk about Obama benefiting from the publicity and competition associated with the long struggle against HRC, that’s probably true. In retrospect, the largest advantage derived by Barack Obama from the nomination battle may well have been the obstinate belief of Republicans that he was very vulnerable in the general election–not to mention the really strange conviction that putting Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket would pull all those Clinton supporters across the line.


Opening Wedge On Health Reform?

Well, it’s an eyebrow-raiser if nothing else:

President Barack Obama has praised health industry groups for coming forward with an offer to reduce the growth of spending by $2 trillion a year to overhaul the system.
Obama appeared at the White House with an array of industry figures, including union representatives, and called it the occasion “historic.”
Industry figures pledged that they would voluntarily slow their rate increases over the next 10 years.
Obama said the step the industry took Monday must be carried out as part of “a broader effort” to change the health care system, keep costs under control and provide health insurance for the some 46 million Americans who do not now have it.

In an acute analysis of this event, Jonathan Cohn of TNR’s The Treatment blog suggests that it may represent a sea change in health industry strategy for coping with pressure for health care reform:

[T]he industry groups aren’t promising to control costs as an alternative to reform. They’re promising to control costs as part of reform. In fact, some of the efficiency steps they are proposing wouldn’t even be possible without the sorts of changes now under discussion in Washington, because they require changes in legislation.

That’s important, because it creates an opening wedge against what happened in 1994: a combined health industry/Republican campaign to attack universal health care as worse than the status quo. As a hand-wringing Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week by Kimberly Strassel conceded, a status quo-oriented attack on Obama’s health reform proposals probably won’t work in any event:

[T]he days of Republicans winning these battles solely by spooking Americans are over. Phil Gramm, Harry and Louise might have scored with that approach in the 1990s, but the intervening years have brought spiraling costs and public unrest. Americans want a fix. Democrats promise one.

As Cohn warns, the cooperative spirit of the health industry could simply be a ploy to cut a deal that eliminates a “public option” for universal health coverage. But it matters nonetheless, but undercutting any Republican argument that reform is unnecessary, or that the core Obama plan represents “socialized medicine.” It may also indicate a “market signal” that the health care industry hears the whistle of a train leaving the station, and considers reform inevitable this time around.


Elitist Demagoguery

One of the hardiest of conservative attack lines on progressives is that they are elitists who dislike middle-class values and lifestyles, and seek political power to change them. In the most lurid versions of this fantasy, progressives are part of some international or even supernatural conspiracy to destroy the Great American Middle Class (listening to such rants, you would think that there’s no middle class in, say, Europe, or that Democratic voting behavior is unknown outside the upper or lower economic classes).
Laughable as this talk may seem to be to progressives, it keeps recurring, most strikingly in a recent column by the political-analyst-turned-right-wing-pundit Michael Barone that singles out gun policy and climate change as examples of “elitist” contempt and hostility towards the wretched middle class:

For liberal elites, belief in gun control and global warming has taken on the character of religious faith. We have sinned (by hoarding guns or driving SUVs); we must atone (by turning in our guns or recycling); we must repent (by supporting gun control or cap and trade schemes). You may notice that the “we” in question is usually the great mass of ordinary American citizens.
The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyle of the masses, who selfishly insist on living in suburbs and keeping guns for recreation or protection. Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses, who must be disciplined to live according to the elite’s religious dogmas.

This is an amazing passage, eh? It asserts without evidence that the “liberal elite’s” attitudes on these two issues are not only universal, but have the character of religious faith–i.e., they are not based on empirical factors or values shared with “ordinary Americans”–and then suggests that they are motivated not by a desire to achieve any public policy goals (such as lower crime or a non-catastrophic economic future) but by a lust for control of the “sinful.”
By attributing these motives to the “liberal elite,” Barone creates a closed loop of dogma that can’t be refuted, and that makes any debate impossible. On firearms, the real goal of the liberal elite–“usually unstated,” Barone conveniently says–is to ban handgun possesion. Never mind that no leading “liberal,” much less all “liberals,” have actually proposed a total handgun ban. Never mind that the last two Democratic platforms have flatly pledged support for the “constitutional right to bear arms,” or that the most radical gun control measure ever proposed by a Democratic presidential candidate (Al Gore in 2000) was to license gun owners.
Worse yet, on climate change, the introduction of the religious metaphor for support for a cap-and-trade system detracts attention from the more fundamental issue of whether man-made-global-warming does or does not threaten to create a calamity–economic as well as ecological–that we would be wise to avoid. This is a factual question, not one of values or attitudes, and the most reliable scientific authorities on the subject conclude almost unanimously that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and increasingly difficult to mitigate. If the experts are right, then anyone who cared exclusively about the ability of Americans to maintain a traditional middle-class, suburban lifestyle, would be more agitated than an “elitist” who is fine with a radically scaled-back way of living.
Insofar as resistance to climate change legislation happens to be consistent with the interests not of “ordinary Americans,” but of a handful of industries whose share of the energy economy would be reduced by a shift towards non-fossil-fuel sources, not to mention the introduction of efficiency measures, Barone’s efforts to stir up middle-class hatred of the “liberal elite” is a classic example of the elitist demagoguery that Tom Frank so eloquently outlined several years ago in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Since few “ordinary Americans” have much reason to read Michael Barone, you don’t have to do much armchair psychology of the sort that Barone himself so confidently engages in towards the “liberal elite” to guess that his main object is to give malefactors of great wealth the warm glow of feeling an unearned solidarity with the masses.


Let’s be fair to Resurgent Republic – they know what they’re doing. They’re not trying to measure opinions in the most neutral possible way; they are field-testing questions to see which ones produce results the users of their data need

Devotees of opinion polling had a really delightful time last week. They had front-row seats for a heavyweight match between two really major contenders – Democracy Corps and the newly founded Resurgent Republic.
The match started when Stan Greenberg called out Whit Ayers, the pollster behind Resurgent Republic, on two issues – the way Resurgent calculated partisan identification and the phrasing of their questions. (Greenberg’s initial statement can be found here)
Ayers replied (here) and then Jon McHenry of Resurgent and Andrew Baumann of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research – which does D-Corps surveys — took up the party ID question here — with Nate Silver jumping in as well.
For polling methodology fans, as the saying goes, “it don’t get much better than this.” But for non-methodology buffs, the second issue — of question phrasing — was really more engaging. Stan sharply questioned the language of one question – on equality vs. opportunity — and also made the following observation on Resurgent Republics’ questions about Obama’s budget.

Your Republican leaders would have been well served had you asked first whether voters favor or oppose the budget, without describing it – as Democracy Corps does routinely. That would have shown a majority or large plurality in favor of the budget, as in all other polls. Instead, your survey begins with this stunningly biased description: “President Obama has proposed a budget for next year that would spend three point six trillion dollars and have a deficit of one point four trillion dollars.”
That would be okay if you think that is all voters will learn from the media and Democrats about the budget. I suspect they are already hearing about inherited deficits from Bush, the funding for the jobs recovery plan, health care reform, education and energy independence, and about deficits cut in half – all aspects of the budget. Don’t you think the leaders and groups you are advising deserve to know how this might really play out?

Ayers replied:

We followed the initial question about the budget with a series of left versus right arguments. We say, for example, “Candidate A says that investments to address unmet needs in education, energy, and health care are necessary to bring the country out of recession.” We think that is a fair statement of one of the arguments made on behalf of the budget. While we can quibble about a phrase here or there, I am confident that a fair-minded person who reads the entire series of arguments will conclude that we have done an honest job capturing the perspective of the left on the budget.

Well, OK – I’ll bite. I’m a fair-minded kinda guy. Let’s go and take a look at those other questions.
To start with, here’s the full text of the question that Ayers cites above:

Q.22. Candidate A says that investments to address unmet needs in education, energy, and health care are necessary to bring the country out of recession.
Candidate B says that the Obama Administration is taking advantage of the recession to make massive increases in government spending that will hurt our economy in the future by nearly tripling the national debt in ten years.

Hmmm, this really doesn’t seem particularly unfair to anyone. It reasonably poses a Democratic “investment in unmet needs” perspective against a Republican “spending and debt” focus.
But, inconveniently for Republicans, on this question the Democratic position wins hands down 51% to 43% – a net plus of 8%
Conclusion? The question seems fair and the Democrats solidly win.
But now let’s look at the other questions in the same series about the budget. In fact, two things start to happen – the questions themselves get more and more favorable to the Republican position and – surprise, surprise – the Democratic advantage declines.
For example, when Ayers takes away the notion of “investment in unmet needs in education, energy and health care” from the Democratic position and replaces it with the much more vague and undefined “spending to stimulate the economy” here’s what happens:

Q.19. Candidate A says the proposed level of federal spending is necessary to stimulate the economy and keep us from sliding into a depression.
Candidate B says the proposed level of federal spending will make the economy worse by doubling the national debt in only five years.

The Democratic advantage slips to 2% — 48 for candidate A vs. 46 % for candidate B
Well, from a Republican point of view that’s a whole lot better, but it’s still not good enough. As the saying goes, “they ain’t goin’ for the draw, they’re goin’ for the win”. So what would happen if we pushed the matter even further – by focusing a question just on the issue of increasing government debt alone — and also by throwing in an ad hominem attack on Obama — and also by changing the subject in the middle of the question – all at the same time.

Q. 21. Candidate A says that increasing the debt is a necessary step in fighting a serious recession.
Candidate B says that President Obama is being hypocritical by adding more than nine trillion dollars to the debt after attacking Republicans for growing it by two trillion dollars.

In this case, the result is no better –a two point Democratic advantage still remains – 48 to 46%. Dang, those pesky Democrats are just damn stubborn.
OK, that does it. It’s time to take off the gloves and really get to work. Let’s see what happens if we use extremely cold, abstract and uninvolving words for the Democratic alternative and then sharp, punchy, TV sound-bite language for the Republican alternative:

Q. 18. Candidate A says the proposed budget is a reasonable response to a serious recession and collapse of the financial markets.
Candidate B says the proposed budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much.

Mmmm,– we get an 8 point Republican advantage on this one – 43% for candidate A (who sounds an awful lot like Mike Dukakis at his most wonky) and 51% for candidate B (who sounds a lot like Newt Gingrich when the cameras are rolling and 15 microphones are stuck in his face). Now that’s more like it.
But, hey, since we’re trying out stuff here, let’s see what happens when we go for the “full Limbaugh” – on the Democratic side a flat, post-lobotomy monotone and on the other a veritable kitchen sink of slogans – “squandering money” “pork barrel projects” “bailouts” “big spending” “few jobs”

Q. 25. Candidate A says the federal government has to do more during times of economic crisis, and spending by the government stimulates the economy and creates jobs.
Candidate B says the federal government is squandering money on pork-barrel projects, bailouts, and big spending programs that create few private sector jobs.

Whoa, now that’s some really big roundhouse punches getting thrown here. But confound it; we seem to have hit a wall. This question only produces the same 8 point Republican advantage as the last one. 43% for candidate A, 51% for candidate B.
Oh well, it doesn’t look like there’s much more tinkering we can do with these budget questions without throwing in the well-known (at least on the rightroots internet) facts that Obama is a wanted international Moslem terrorist and also Joe Stalin’s illegitimate Black grandson.
OK, now I admit I’m being a good deal more than slightly tongue in cheek here, but the point is serious. When Ayers says “I am confident that a fair-minded person who reads the entire series of arguments will conclude that we have done an honest job capturing the perspective of the left on the budget,” anyone who doesn’t burst out laughing like a hyena simply has to be getting a paycheck from the RNC.
But Ayers is not foolish or wasting his clients money. These questions are useful. They essentially represent message research to determine just what “works” and what doesn’t and how far the Republican message has to be favored to outpoll the Dems. When Resurgent Republic drafted these questions they had a pretty good idea of how they would poll. But by trying out a variety of question wordings side by side, they provide a more precise idea of just how much changes in rhetoric and language can actually influence the debate.
But as for their larger political significance, I’ll leave the final word to Stan Greenberg in his message to Ayers:

For years, James Carville and I pushed Democrats and liberal groups to examine inherited positions in new times, but you are at risk of doing the opposite – urging Republicans to stay the course on key arguments with self-deluding results.
In some cases, you prove competitive or you win the argument by presenting the Democratic argument as flat but the Republican, full of emotive terms. In Democracy Corps, we always try to use the language actually used by our opponents.
Nothing is more self-defeating than attributing to the Democratic argument the language and themes Republicans use to attack Democrats rather than the language Democrats use themselves. In effect, your survey has you winning an argument with yourself.


‘Swift Boat’ Ads Launched to Stop Health Reform

WaPo‘s Dan Eggen has an article today about the launching of the GOP’s ad campaign to stop health care reform. Eggen reports that the ads

feature horror stories from Canada and the United Kingdom: Patients who allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn’t get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment.

As if there are no long waits in private sector health care and Americans don’t spend many millions on cheaper drugs from Canada.
The ad campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the firm most famous for its “Swift Boat’ attack campaign to discredit 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry. Rick Scott, a leader and spokesmen for the campaign and former partner with W in the Texas Rangers, is also a former hospital chief executive who Eggen reports was ousted from the helm of the Columbia/HCA health-care company during a fraud investigation in the 1990s. “The firm eventually pleaded guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans, paying a record $1.7 billion in fines,” explains Eggen.
The good news is that the ads are already being challenged, as Eggen reports:

In an ad broadcast in the Washington area and in Scott’s home town of Naples, Fla., last week, a group called Health Care for America Now says of Scott: “He and his insurance-company friends make millions from the broken system we have now.”
The group’s national campaign manager, Richard Kirsch, said: “Those attacking reform are really looking to protect their own profits, and he’s a perfect messenger for that. His history of making a fortune by destroying quality in the health-care system and ripping off the government is a great example of what’s really going on.”

The Scott/CRC ads are in line with the strategy suggested by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, whose paper on stopping President Obama’s health care refom initiative I discussed at TDS last week.
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) says, via HuffPo, that the Luntz strategy is “intended to prolong the broken system we have today” and he describes it thusly:

So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz’s doublespeak will argue for a “balanced, common sense approach” to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They’ll say that a public plan will not be “patient centered,” but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They’ll say reform will deny Americans “choice” even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They’ll claim that the “quality of care will go down,” while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.

Also at HuffPo, Chris Weigant offers some good strategy pointers in his post “Countering the Luntz Playbook on Health Care,” including:

…We’ve got an easier job than Republicans in convincing the people, because they already agree with the most basic Democratic premises on health care — every family has a health insurance horror story. Meaning “the system is broken” is not something we have to convince people of. The Republicans, meanwhile, have only fear. Which brings us to our first talking point.

And when a Republican Senator/member of congress starts railing against government involvement in health care as a form of socialism, Weigant has a response:

“Excuse me, Senator, but I can’t help but pointing out that the health care you receive from the American taxpayers could be called ‘socialized medicine’ as well. And yet, I notice that you accept this health care — which is paid for straight out of the American taxpayer’s wallet. Are you over 65? Have you refused all Medicare benefits, since you are so adamant about the evils of ‘socialized medicine’? If you are trying to limit American citizens from getting the health care you yourself enjoy, which is incidentally paid for by those very same taxpayers, why should anyone listen to what you have to say? You are saying ‘I’ve got mine’ and at the same time ‘nobody else should get to choose what I’ve got’ even though they’re paying for yours. I will start to listen to you on the evils and dangers of government health care when you voluntarily give up your own government health care and go out and buy insurance on the open market. By doing so, you might begin to understand the crisis as the average Americans see it… but until you do, I have to say you’re being somewhat of a hypocrite, Senator.”

George Lakoff, along with colleagues Glenn W. Smith and Eric Haas, have a list of ten principles of health care reform messaging, also at HuffPo. Among the nuggets mined by Lakoff, Smith and Haas:

Why do HMO’s have a high administrative cost – 15 to 20 percent or more? They spend money to justify denying you the care you need and all too often delaying care so much that you are harmed by the delay…
The American Plan is there to provide you care, not deny or delay it. Its administrative costs would be low, about 3 percent….HMO’s are big spenders, not on your health, but on administrative costs, commercials to tout their plans, and profits to investors. As much as 20 to 30% of what you pay does not go to your care. In The American Plan, 97% of what you pay goes for your care. It’s a better deal for you and for our country.

The authors also emphasize the importance of stating that “Health care is a moral issue” and underscoring the “central principle of empathy.” While it is important to affirm the moral case for comprehensive health care reform, I would also emphasize that it is a compelling national security priority, when we have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world, nearly 50 million citizens have zero health insurance, when tens of millions of Americans are in immediate danger of economic ruin in the event of a catastrophic illness and many more millions simply don’t know how much their insurance will cover —- until they get the bill.