Saving the Health Care Reform Agenda

[TayTay]

Okay, this is not good. These Town Halls are getting seriously degraded. (Town Meetings in New England can often look like these Town Halls with rowdy groups of people loudly arguing with each other over whether or not to allocate $2000 to fix the sand on the beach for the summer. But New Englanders are a grumpy lot in general and arguing loudly and rudely over political stuff is our birthright and a treasured way of life. I worry that the rest of the country can't handle this and will take it personally. Sigh!)

The right has turned out in force. The news media is seeing just how insane and nutty a lot of the right wing really is. However, the news media is afraid of angering the nuts, so it tries to find something nice to say about them. Since this is damn near impossible, they are reduced to reporting what the nuts are actually saying. Since it is very difficult to seriously report things like "Obama wants roving bands of death squads to do away with Gramma," the news media is in a quandary. They might actually have to fact check this stuff and that costs money. Oh no!

And our side is not helping. We are having a wonk-off on this debate. We have 32 reasons, with 7 subclauses and 3 linked notes to each reason, on our side. We need to get some easily understood points out there to start framing our side of the debate. This is not dumbing down the debate. It is giving it a rational starting point.


What 3 things should be said about health care reform that people can remember?

Health reform will:

-- give coverage to those who have been denied it in the past
-- Not let insurance co's deny coverage for a pre-existing condition
-- not let an insurance company bean-counter drop your coverage because you are too expensive to insure.

Any else have any thoughts on this? This is talk meant for the rest of America that does not read liberal-leaning blogs.

[Blaukraut]

1. I have to blame the media here

MSNBC is one of the better 24 hour cable outlets, and that isn't saying much. For example: They carried Obama's townhall in its entirety on Tuesday, but as soon as it was over, the pundits expressed their disappointment and disbelief at the civility of the questions and immediately questioned whether the questioners were hand-picked. They then decided that covering Claire McCaskill's event was so much more entertaining because it was unruly and chaotic.
For the rest of the afternoon - and I kept watching - MSNBC uttered nary a word about Obama's event (other than the gun-toting loser, of course. He even got a platform on Hardball later) but continuously ran clips of McCaskill's, and other townhall disasters, discussing the protesters and their anger.

There have been a great number of successful, informative, and polite townhalls, as listed in this post.

Unfortunately, until the MSM decides to cover those as well, and have honest discussions about the real contents of the bills, the viewers will come away with the impression that the Dems are losing the battle, and that the protesters have legitimate concerns based on facts.

The Democrats and other proponents of HCR can list the basic reform points in the simplest terms possible until they're blue in the face, but unless they are being covered by the media, who will listen?

[Inuca]

4. It's the same old story

the media will cover accidents, car chases, any kind of "catastrophe" big and small. Important things that do not have a metaphorical resemblance to that accident of the highway that you just MUST turn your head to have a peak at are not covered or barely mentioned. Similar idea for "stars" vs. "regular folks". The "regular folk" I have in mind right now is Jim Webb. I did not watch any news, just saw the info on Google that managed to free the journalist jailed in Myanmar. I am willing to bet anything that the coverage of this will be one hundredth of the coverage for BC and the two girls freed from NK.

And of course all this completely changes the perception people have of what is happening and what is important. You mention MSNBC running clips of the McCaskill "townhall disaster". I was there. It was rather bad, but definitely not a disaster. There were loud boos and than the Rosa Parks poster incident. I did not realize what it was all about until I read about it! I was seated far from where it happened, but pretty high in the bleachers (is that what they are called? The seats in a sports auditorium) so I had a good view. I saw that a black woman was taken out by what I thought were the campus security but they may have been the police, and then heard McCaskill comments that I am sure you heard (repeatedly) on TV, and it was over in a couple of minutes. The way it was presented in the news was like it was the core of the whole meeting, which most definitely it was NOT. Right after it was over, McCaskill commented something along the lines that she is sure that in spite of the rather good discussion that took place, this will be what the media reports will focus on. She was obviously correct (and did you notice how the media showed her comments right after the incident, but never the quote that I just mentioned? At least I never heard it). As I said, it was not a disastrous meeting, like some others that I had seen/heard/read snippets of, though of course given my experience with this one meeting I wonder how terrible the others were overall. As I said, the one that I attended was definitely not supportive of the reform (my very rough guess is approx. 2/3 or more against), loud boos (but it was a large crowd, probably around 1500 or so), but the questions themselves were relatively reasonable ones. One last thing about this, again related to how the way media presents things tends to distort: I heard at least a couple of times comments critical of McCaskill because at one point she said "You do not trust me?". The talking heads commented that this is the wrong thing to say, you do not ask something like this because under the circumstances the reply will be a loud NO (which it was). The thing is that she did not really ask this, she was repeating what somebody in the audience said, sounded almost like she was not sure she heard it right and wanted to make sure. Overall, I was quite impressed with how she conducted herself. In control both of the issues and, to the extent possible, of the crowd. She brought along her 80+ year old mother, small and frail, (saying that she INSISTED to come) who said a few words at the very beginning, presenting herself as the poster case for the need for health care reform, listing her many ailments, etc. At some point toward the end, the mother left the podium, leaning on the arm of a big guy from McCaskil's entourage (she came back later, probably she just had to go to the bathroom or something), and as she was leaving she said "Give them hell, Claire!". Not in the microphone, but she was close enough that it was clearly audible and resulted in a big round of applause.

Anyway... I started to write meaning to comment on the media thing, and it turned into something else. But I wanted to tell you guys about the meeting in any case, just did not get the chance/time until now, so here it is :-)

[beachmom]

2. Honestly, I made the choice not to watch the news for the entire month of August.

I go on line for headlines and on issues/people that interest me, but that's it. I only look at a tiny fraction of all the stuff on the town hall meetings. Notably (btw), there was a town hall meeting in GA hosted by a Democrat, and there were no problems. So that is never reported on.

[sandnsea]

3. 1200 At Townhall, Civil And Cheering

http://www.theworldlink.com/articles/2009/08/14/news/doc4a859bb4cc4c0592810499.txt

They're going very well in some parts of the country. Don't let the cable news fool you.

We need to get into campaign mode, that's all.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/user/login?successurl=L3BhZ2UvZGFzaGJvYXJkL3ByaXZhdGU=&_h=R7eLleNlvR32IUbri4ek40kHrFI

[JI7]

5. the so called "activists" or rather whiners are not helping either

they keep demanding OBAMA and other Dems who DO support not only public option but single payer DO this or that.

if it was as simple as just Obama supporting it than it would have already been done.

they need to convince those who don't support it and even more important the regular voters to support it. but that would require doing actual work rather than just feeling morally superior themselves and saying they always knew Obama was going to sell out.