Political Culture: At Town Halls, Tea and Thuggery

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Political Culture: At Town Halls, Tea and Thuggery

This column needs to begin with an apology to the Secretary of State. Hillary, the primary reason I was unable to support you last year was my belief that your presidency would become mired in the same irrational Republican hatred that hobbled, then crippled your husband’s tenure. I was certain that, between the two of you, only Barack Obama could tame the rabid beast, by virtue of the generational shift he represented and the fact that his last name (however exotic) is not Clinton. I also believed, I freely admit, that his detractors would sense the need to tone down their belligerence and behave with more civility in order to avoid the stench of racism.

Whoops!

As if we needed any more evidence, the events of the last several days leave no question that the Republican Party has removed itself from the mainstream of political discourse. It doesn’t matter who the president is – Obama, or Hillary, or Jesus Christ himself (whom we all know would be backing single-payer). The small minority of Americans who still call themselves Republicans (hovering around 25 percent) have driven into insanity’s ditch, and are spinning their wheels furiously … not to pull themselves out, but to dig in deeper. The orchestrated assaults on town-hall meetings across the nation this week do not – cannot – reflect the GOP as a whole, but they’ve showcased the party’s public face: a tiny, frightened (and frightening) group of people, bought and paid for by special interests, who are hellbent on stifling the nation’s policy debate by hijacking the get-togethers with vicious invective and then shouting down any attempts to move intelligently past their outbursts.

Two weeks ago, when President Obama was asked why he was pushing Congress to finish its work on healthcare legislation before the August recess, he benignly noted that “if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town.” Four days after that recess began for House members, anyone who wasn’t already clued in now knows the real reason his deadline was so important to the Democrats (and why extending it was so important to Republicans like Michael “Slow down, Mr. President” Steele). Obama and Steele both knew that once the congressmen’s planes left Washington, they’d be flying straight into a shitstorm of well-organized lunatics desperate to see them, and Obama himself, fail.

Their “protests” are not really about healthcare. The special-interest groups giving them their marching orders are the same folks who brought you April’s adventures in teabagging – the lobbyist-run Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Patriots. (They’re planning to double-dip the teabags later this month.) And they’re shouting the same talking-points pabulum they sputtered last spring … the same material they’d be using if this summer’s debate were over climate change, or education, or the care and feeding of kittens.

They’ve been cheered on by the House Republican leader, John Boehner, who last week voiced a premonition that Democrats would face a “very, very hot August.” And they’ve been schooled in the art of anti-democratic disruption by a group called Right Principles (tied to FreedomWorks), which explained in a widely distributed “strategy memo” how protesters should proceed:

“1. Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half … The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.
2. Be Disruptive Early and Often … Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.
3. Try to Rattle Him, Not Have an Intelligent Debate.”

Here’s that plan put into motion, at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Lloyd Doggett in Austin, Texas:

This is not democracy in action. This is a putsch. It has been designed, organized and funded by narrow interests to thwart the will of the people. And the results, in addition to such displays of sheer petulance inside town-hall meetings from coast to coast, have ranged from a Maryland congressman hung in effigy to a New York representative who needed police to escort him away from a seething mob, to a phoned-in death threat against a representative from North Carolina – not to mention a protester in Connecticut screaming that Sen. Chris Dodd, who recently received a prostate-cancer diagnosis, should be put out of his misery with a “handful” of painkillers “flush(ed) down … with Ted Kennedy’s whiskey.” Hilarious!

The lesson to be taken from this new round of reactionary ranting is not that conservatives are the last bastion of fiscal responsibility – they lost all credibility on that score years ago. Nor is it that, now that they’re thoroughly out of power, they’ve been liberated to indulge their charade that Ayn Rand-approved selfishness is a political philosophy rather than a character flaw.

No, the lesson to be learned is the one that should have been made clear 15 years ago, when the lunatic fringe began accusing Bill Clinton of rape and Hillary of murder – that conservatives, drenched in the bile of their absolutism, believe the reins of power in this country are their birthright. And whenever they are driven from power (1992, 2008) they feel entitled to use all means necessary, from insults to intimidation to outright thuggery, to deny their opponents an opportunity to enact the agenda Americans voted for.

That agenda, as far as healthcare is concerned, was already on the rocks even before this week’s marauders hung out their teabags. The odds of Congress passing some form of legislation this year, which once seemed like such easy pickings, currently seem to stand just over 50/50, and Democrats have already given up more than half the store just to get bills out of committee with some patina of intra-party consensus. It hasn’t helped that Obama turned the sausage-grinding process over to Congress in the first place, rather than put forward his own plan; it also hasn’t helped that individual congressmen have been forced to face the mobs this month without a specific bill to defend. Still, as this week’s steady push toward bipartisan compromise in the Senate Finance Committee shows, the final decisions will be taken in spite of, not as a result of, the chaos of August. The eventual bill will be a dog’s breakfast that doesn’t even include a “public option,” and few (if any) Republicans will vote for it – which means that meaningful reform will remain out of reach as long as Americans continue to accept the notion of healthcare as a profit-making concern rather than an individual right.

In the meantime, the most profound outcome of the town-hall uproar most likely will be a backlash against its perpetrators and a further diminution of the conservative “movement.” However, it’s impossible to deny the potential for these ambushes to escalate into physical violence, either this month or the next time the special interests decide to mobilize some ginned-up outrage. In fact, that threat seemed to escalate this morning when the AFL-CIO promised to send its members to meetings in 50 congressional districts to argue for reform. Should teabagger violence break out — directed at fellow attendees or even a member of Congress — will Boehner, Rush, Fox News and the rest of the vast right-wing conspiracy be chastened … or celebratory?

Tags: Americans for Prosperity, Barack Obama, FreedomWorks, healthcare, Hillary Clinton, John Boehner, Jon Cummings, Political Culture, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Sen. Chris Dodd, Tea Party Patriots, teabaggers, town halls, vast right-wing conspiracy

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Current Events, Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Political Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Joel

Good post. Lots of food for thought.

Standing Damaged

So far the ones I've seen online remind me of the Brooks Brothers rioters....and look what THEY did for the nation.So LET some union headbusters show up and put these so called grassrooters courage to the test, since as far as war is concerned they've already shown they are only willing to join the 101st Keyboard Kommados.
But when Mr Change and his partys' owned corporate whores refused to even allow single payer to be put on the table? Face it - theis stuff is all sideline emotionally charged kabuki for the masses.
George Carlin was right - they OWN us..........
Siiiigh

annielogue

I want to meet these people who love their health insurance to find out how they make it work. There must be some trick to it that they know, and we would all be better off if they would share it.

Although my guess is that quite a few are on Medicare disability . . .

autodidact

Beyond issues of ideology, beyond issues of which president is really The Joker (Bush was depicted as such years before this Obama poster), we are faced with a simple problem. It's a problem not of compassion versus selfishness. It is a problem of wealth. We've been living beyond our means -- consuming more than we were producing -- for decades. At a time when we should have been storing up nuts for the winter, which even the dumb squirrels have sense to do, we've been running up the national and personal credit card balance.

The party's over. It's hangover time.

Obama complained about the deficits he "inherited." But of course about a trillion of that was the bankster bailout program he and McCain both pushed last fall, a money trap known a TARP. Whether he inherited them or not, even his own budgets show deficits that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era stretching out for ten years. And that's assuming a quick return to 4-5% economic growth, which no one believes will happen. TARP is only the tip of the iceberg. The Federal Reserve, Tax-Cheat Timmy Geithner's pals, have been running the printing presses until they're white hot, buying and selling God knows what in the past year to the tune of about $10 Trillion. (What these transactions were, exactly, and on what terms, they will not say.) To me it looks like the final mad dash to run up the credit card before declaring national bankruptcy.

We blew our last shred of fiscal credibility on pumping up the financial system -- bailing out wheeling-dealing folks who should have failed and been reduced to food stamps like 35 million other Americans. There's nothing left for health care. Sorry folks. It's gone.

Health care was part of the binge. With an aging population, there will be more demand, and even higher expectations. There will not be enough real wealth to provide. There will be rationing, voluntary or involuntary, visible and invisible, because resources are going to be more limited in the future. What disturbs me the most is when Obama implies no one will really have to give anything up, and Pelosi says the reform plan means "a cap on your costs, but no cap on your benefits." Seriously, you cannot make this up. This is like saying she believes in perpetual motion machines.

I don't like to see ranting, shouting, or threats of violence from either side. But I advise you, Jon, that for every shouter and ranter, there are a hundred, maybe even a thousand people who calmly, rationally, see a lot that they don't like in the proposed "solutions" for health care advanced by Washington. Part of it is unwillingness to face the reality that there are not enough resources to provide for everyone the level of care that we've come to expect from the system. Part of it is a deepening distrust of any solutions imposed on us from professional politicians who are increasingly out of touch with normal life in America. The politicians who've allowed Medicare to go so far in the red are the same ones who now claim they can manage health care for everyone? Not credible. And part of it is the fear of a loss of being able to choose our own destinies, even if that choice is a choice between unpleasant alternatives. It's still nice to be able to pick your own poison.

Don't sell conservatives short. We do think and care deeply. And we care a lot about personal liberty. Yes, that's going to conflict with those who believe in "rights" that involve dipping into others' pockets. I don't know where we go from here. I do know that healing the economy will lessen the tensions, but small business has traditionally been the engine of economic growth and job growth, and the current government has done relatively little to incentivize small business, and it's done a lot that scares the living crap out of small business. We really need to get our spending problems under control, get America producing real wealth again (instead of Wall Street profits from shuffling paper around, selling and re-selling even more debt). Otherwise, man, all I can see is more unrest as the bankruptcies roll on, the mortgages continue to be foreclosed, the states start firing employees under budget distress, and the Fed's printing presses add inflation on top of the misery.

JonCummings

You know, this is by far the most cogent statement of your views that I've seen you post, and believe me, I appreciate that. I disagree with a bunch of it--particularly your notion that granting "rights" to one set of people necessitates an unfair dipping into everyone else's pockets -- but we're always going to disagree on that, and I accept it.

The difference in our financial observations on the need for healthcare reform, in my view, is that you see an out-of-control budget that negates the possibility of adding further costs, in the short term, in order to implement such reform; meanwhile, I see an out-of-control system that will never right itself, long term, until that very reform is implemented.

There are a million other points to be debated, through substance or potshots. For example, you state that we can't trust the "politicians who've allowed Medicare to go so far in the red" to implement a comprehensive healthcare strategy...but aren't the politicians who did that the ones who kicked back a humongous tax cut to the rich eight years ago rather than using the surplus to fix Social Security and Medicare through Al Gore's widely ridiculed "lockbox"? Those politicians who gave that tax cut are the very ones who would now block healthcare reform and, if they could, end Medicare and Social Security. Isn't that like saying, "You see, we've proven when we were running this government that this government can't be run, so let's stop pretending somebody else can do it better"?

Someday, healthcare will need to undergo monumental reform -- the same way that the banking system needed major reform five or 10 years ago. Is it going to require an out-and-out crisis, similar to the current one with the banks, before we start plugging the healthcare dike with TARP-like emergency measures (which you won't like either, but which will be far more expensive than what's being proposed now)? Such a crisis is exactly what Obama and the Democrats are hoping to avoid by taking this up now, even in the midst of our other problems. It might not be the most fiscally responsible thing to do, if such things are measured only in terms of short-term credits and deficits, but it's the most responsible thing to do if we're looking at the long-term health of the economy (and, by the way, the American people).

autodidact

Your final argument is dangerously close to Joe Biden's quip, "We have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt!" You gotta love Joe, the gift that keeps on giving.

I won't agree necessarily that the tax cuts were a bad idea. The tax cuts without spending cuts, and with the cost of a war added on top were a bad idea. The problem is that people who call themselves conservative, and people who are called conservative by the left, like Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney and all the others who act as if deficits don't matter (until the Democrats get back in power), aren't really conservative, from where I sit. CINO? (Conservative in name only?)

And the left's agenda has been just as cruelly hijacked, as I think you can see now in the wake of the Wall Street bailouts, a Cap 'n Trade bill that is more about making money for Wall Street carbon credit markets than reducing GHGs (see Matt Taibbi), and now a move to negotiate with insurance and drug companies. This will probably increase the market for them and ultimately lead to higher profits (even if it comes at lower margins). The Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime looks to be more about crony capitalism with a mask of socialism than anything else. Nah, I don't think it means long-term economic health going that route.

As for me, I reject all these phonies. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, they're just posers, neither left nor right. They're in it for number one. What I want is freedom to choose my own light bulbs and my own health care. Maybe that means, like my self-employed friend, I have to go to Guatemala for a knee operation. But free people find ways of making things work. Maybe I should be rooting for Cap and Trade and HR3200. It will only hasten the collapse from which freedom may again blossom. I just don't relish the anarchy that might ensue between collapse and renewal.

Have you read HR3200, by the way? I confess I'm only 5% through it. "Read the bill! Read the bill!" I guess that applies to me. But already, on page 25, I see that all the particulars of insurance coverage, who and what is covered, and how much can be charged, will be dictated by Secretary of HHS, advised by a panel of Presidential appointees. This makes the Executive Branch a czar over health insurance. So when Limbaugh and other conservative voices say this is a government takeover of health care, that WAS the intention. It is absolutely true. The fact you buy from a private insurer is irrelevant when all the details of your coverage are dictated by unelected bureaucrats.

Well, I've got more reading to do. I'm hoping the truth of the details will rise above the shouting.

JonCummings

Your last paragraph reflects an ever more common -- and to my mind, poisonous -- attitude that precludes the possibility of the government ever doing anything beneficial for its citizens, and also negates any possibility that someone may go into public service with the idea of helping people, rather than accumulating power for its own sake.

The only way the contents of page 25 can possibly be construed as a bad thing are if you assume nefarious intentions on the part of poor Kathleen Sibelius, or assume that the panel of presidential appointees will be in the pocket of ... who, exactly? Blue Cross? Pfizer? Dr. Evil?

The idea of standardizing insurance coverage is to establish fair and cost-effective MINIMUMS for coverage, not to determine who lives and who dies from some "bureaucrat"'s office in Washington. (I'm so glad to have the utterly wicked Sarah Palin on the record with such a ridiculous lie.) And the entire point of creating this panel of experts is to REMOVE the politics from decision-making on healthcare.

The simple fact of the matter is, somebody is ALREADY "dictating the details of your coverage"; the only difference is, at the moment that person is probably somebody who is at least as concerned with turning a tidy profit for shareholders than he is in maintaining your health.

You imagine that if you're unhappy with your coverage, you can use your free-market power to simply switch insurers until you find one that will give you what you want/need. Trouble is, by the time most people realize their insurance is inadequate, it's waaaaaay too late -- try finding a new insurance company to take you when you've got heart surgery scheduled tomorrow.

Your paragraph betrays an utter lack of trust in the capacity of anyone in the government to ever do the right thing. That's fine -- you've earned that lack of trust, as have we all, over many years. But there's always going to be somebody sitting in some office, somewhere, making decisions about insurance coverage -- its cost, its availability, its details -- that will have life-and-death consequences for millions. Right now, those people are corporate insurers, and their way of doing business isn't working. They need to be regulated, now, and that's what page 25 is about.

As for the rest of the bill, feel free to read it in its entirety -- as long as you're not merely scanning it for clauses that you can twist into some sort of cooked-up evidence that the folks who are trying, however successfully, to extend healthcare and fix what's wrong with the current system are "downright evil." There's no need for you to bother doing that. Sarah, and a bunch of other immoral dim bulbs, are already doing it for you.

I believe I have a healthy-enough skepticism for the workings of government, and I certainly wish we could assure accountability for bad decisions and corruption. But I refuse to take such a jaundiced view of it all that I'd have to reject the possibility that universal healthcare, or education reform, or climate-change legislation, should even be attempted because everyone's motives are suspect.