Truly, the lesser of two evils
Published by punkass marc November 26th, 2007 in Health, Rights? What rights?Ezra’s post slamming Obama’s wimpy stand on health care (largely because his plan isn’t universal and still would require us to pay premiums) hits the nail on the head. He correctly lambasts Obama for failing to capitalize on his chance to become — using Ezra’s analogy — the Reagan of the left.
The Democrats’ central failing as a party in the 21st century has been their dedication to furthering unfounded conservative frames. In this case, Obama buys into their BS on health care, but we’ve seen similar parroting on “security” and wartime tough-talk, environmental issues, economic policy, foreign affairs, taxes, and more. Conservatives paint a narrow, bigoted view of reality grounded in privilege. After so many years of watching them cave, I am left to assume the Democrats see the canvas the same way.
Truthfully, though, we all understand why Obama has hedged here specifically and why Democrats continue to wuss out at every opportunity. It’s all about the money.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why little RonPaulites think the country would be so much better if it were run by corporations instead of our present style of government. That has to be one of the dumbest, most obvious false dichotomies I’ve ever heard.
Even Obama, funding his campaign (*almost* entirely) without the help of PACs and lobbyists, hasn’t exactly crossed them, either. In fact, his health care plan would explicitly mimic the current health benefits a federal employee enjoys, providing coverage through private corporate partners like Aetna. In other words, his plan would send our premiums and government subsidies to the same corporations greedily inhibiting true health care reform.
Welcome to the new Democratic Party.
3 Responses to “Truly, the lesser of two evils”
- 1 Pingback on Dec 3rd, 2007 at 1:58 am
It’s frustrating to see how the Democrats ate up George Lakoff’s books and then didn’t get the fundamental message: Argue with your frames, not theirs. John Edwards gets it, to be fair. He fucks up a lot, but he’s going around the country talking about poverty as a scourge, abandoning the conservative frame that Bill Clinton bought into that presupposed it was just a nifty way to motivate the underclass to work harder.
Interesting long post on Lakoff. It suggests some good reasons why Obama is not following his advice on “framing” issues. I think Obama is smart enough to understand that it will take real substance to move the political debate, especially on an issue as large and important as health care.
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/open_university/archive/2006/11/04/60751.aspx
“Lakoff’s direct influence on the language of the Democrats has been negligible. He may have had the ear of some prominent Democrats, but you couldn’t tell it by what comes out of their mouths. And no wonder…Lakoff’s own framing suggestions are pretty lame. Democratic politicians don’t need to know anything about cognitive science to realize that referring to taxes as “membership fees” or to trial lawyers as “public protection attorneys” would make them easy targets of Republican ridicule. And as for his proposal that Democrats should reframe “activist judges” as “freedom judges,” a Google search turns up no instances of the phrase apart from remarks that make fun of the suggestion. True, linguists coin slogans about as well as physicists ride bicycles.”