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*TIA Daily* • *September 3, 2009 * Death Panels Remember the debate about whether government-controlled medicine leads to "death panels"? It's over. ------------------------------ *Top News Stories* 1. Symbolism and Grandiloquent Speeches <#12383dab914daf8e_Item+1> 2. Death Panels <#12383dab914daf8e_Item+2> 3. Contempt for the Governed <#12383dab914daf8e_Item+3> ------------------------------ We appreciate your comments; please write to [email protected]. ------------------------------ *Top News Stories* *Commentary by Robert Tracinski* 1. Symbolism and Grandiloquent Speeches The Great Town Hall Rebellion of 2009 has had its impact. The *Washington Times* recounts<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/03/some-dems-after-town-halls-spurn-health-plan/?source=newsletter_must-read-stories-today_more_news_carousel>the number of Democratic congressmen who have been forced to renounce the Obama bill in public in front of meetings of angry constituents. But the defections of the conservative Democrats are sparking a civil war<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/96d44406-98b3-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1>with the party's far left. [C]entrist Democratic senators, including Ben Nelson, whose support will be essential, continued to say they would vote against a bill with a public option. "I see two endings," Mr. Nelson told the *Journal Star* newspaper on Thursday. "One is we find areas we can agree upon and begin to do things incrementally taking more of an insurance approach, not a government approach. The other is that it [the bill] implodes." Meanwhile, Jan Schakowsky, a leading progressive Democratic lawmaker, said liberals were not prepared to climb down. "I will support nothing short of a robust public health insurance plan." Over at RealClearPolitics, Jay Cost explains<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2009/09/its_time_for_obama_to_change_c.html>why President Obama is going to have a hard time resolving this conflict: [T]he President is not a prime minister. His power [to advance legislation] is largely *informal*. Richard Neustadt called it the power to persuade, to influence others to do what they would not otherwise do. A President whose job approval rating is low or quickly falling is less persuasive, and thus less powerful. But that isn't going to stop Obama from trying. He is planning<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/health/policy/03care.html>to intervene in the debate with his favorite tool: the Big Speech: President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements. Democratic Senator Chuch Schumer has gotten all excited: "This level of involvement from the president could well be a game-changer. There is no better way to turn public opinion around than to have someone as popular as President Obama addressing the American people directly, without intermediaries interpreting, or misinterpreting, his ideas." But hasn't Obama been talking up a storm on the health-care bill since mid-July—and hasn't this led to a precipitous *decline* in his popularity? If anything he had to say were capable of moving the debate, it would have done so already. Some time ago, I concluded<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obama_wraps_up_the_bush_status.html>that "all there has ever been to Barack Obama is symbolism and grandiloquent speeches," and that certainly seems to be the case with this speech. He will try to use pretty words to paper over the fact that he has nothing knew or even specific to offer on the substance: But the [White House] officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned. The deepest lesson to be drawn from this is that Obama's health-care bill is not losing because of a failure of style or tactics. It is losing because the substance of the bill is a government takeover of health care—and Americans hate this idea, no matter how it is packaged. The article below describes how the Democrats have been evading this fact for years, and this report is itself an indication of the reluctance with which the political mainstream is grappling with the phenomenon of a massive, spontaneous, grass-roots political rebellion against statism. "Wrong Turns: How Obama's Health-Care Push Went Astray<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125193901923781757.html>," Jonathan Weisman, Neil King, and Janet Adamy, *Wall Street Journal*, September 3 A group called the Herndon Alliance—a coalition of liberal health-care groups, unions and patient-advocacy groups created in late 2005—was only a few months into its work planning a health-insurance overhaul by the time it asked focus groups what they thought of the idea of a government-run plan to compete with private ones. The public-option was an article of faith for many in the alliance, but the focus groups' reactions were sobering. Skepticism ran high. The chief worry: Giving access to inexpensive government insurance to America's 46 million uninsured would boost costs, or reduce care, for those who were already insured. When pollsters told the advocacy groups the public option probably wouldn't fly, they were told to paper over the problem with a better "message," according to a participant in the project. "We tried to do our best to come up with some fancy words to help talk about this," this participant said, but in the end, he said, marketers and pollsters involved in the Herndon Alliance may have told their advocacy group clients what they wanted to hear…. A look back suggests the president and his allies may have "overlearned" the lessons of President Bill Clinton's 1993–1994 health-care defeat. They expended great effort to line up the support of health-care insurers, pharmaceutical makers and care providers, believing that by keeping them around the table, they could win over Republicans and stop the kind of industry-led attacks that helped sink the Clinton plan. But this strategy left out the wooing of public opinion, which was being affected by broader events, including the economic crisis and anger over bank bailouts…. The president's focus on wooing groups often brought fewer benefits than he expected. The seniors' lobby AARP backed him, but that prompted loud complaints from AARP members worried about Medicare cuts. The American Medical Association's cautious backing was countered by state doctors' groups opposed to a public health plan. Lawmakers, as they disbanded for the August recess, were shocked by the level of discontent they found bubbling at home. Rep. Peter Welch, a liberal Democrat from Vermont, had his epiphany during a meeting in a Mini Mart parking lot in Derbyline, a small town on the Canadian border. Over 50 people crowded around a couple of Dumpsters to berate him. "It was stunning," Rep. Welch said. "They came with talking points" gleaned from talk radio. *back to top* <#12383dab914daf8e_TOC> 2. Death Panels Here is another example of why President Obama is losing the health-care debate on the substance of the issue, not just on style or tactics. Remember the debate about whether government-controlled medicine leads to "death panels"? It's over. London's *Daily Telegraph* has an eye-opening report on how a set of government guidelines mandating that care be cut off for dying patients is leading to the unnecessary deaths of patients who might otherwise have recovered. It seems that in Britain's National Health Service, the decision to cut off care is made, not by the patient or his family, but by a panel of doctors and NHS officials. Sounds like a "death panel" to me. Most interesting is one doctor's concern that this is "tick box medicine that stops people thinking." In other words, it is a system that turns doctors into paper shufflers whose job is to fill in forms rather than understand the patient's condition and treat it. Which is precisely what we opponents of socialized medicine have been warning will happen<http://www.intellectualactivist.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1124>if government takes over health care. "Sentenced to Death on the NHS<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6127514/Sentenced-to-death-on-the-NHS.html>," Kate Devlin, *Daily Telegraph*, September 2 Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors have warned. In a letter to *The Daily Telegraph*, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn…. "Forecasting death is an inexact science," they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death "without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong. "As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."… [The guidelines were] recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government's health scrutiny body, in 2004…. Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor…. Dr. Hargreaves…said: "I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this 'death pathway' that is coming in…. "What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying. It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking." *back to top* <#12383dab914daf8e_TOC> 3. Contempt for the Governed The American people are rejecting President Obama's socialist agenda, which is why the left is seeking to bypass the consent of the governed by using the power of the state to control the public debate. I linked yesterday to an article<http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=336613763986105>on the Obama administration's appointment of an open enemy of free speech to a prominent position at the FCC. Now comes the revelation<http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/08/25/the-national-endowment-for-the-art-of-persuasion-patrick-courrielche/>that the administration tried to harness the power of the National Endowment for the Arts to encourage artists to propagandize for the president's political agenda. [I]f you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. "This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a *brand new* conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak *with* the government. What that looks like legally?…bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely…" Is the hair on your arms standing up yet? The whole story is tracked here<http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/278561>. State propaganda is a form of contempt for the governed. Its basic premise is that it is not necessary either to listen to the individual citizen, or to attempt to persuade him. Rather, government's job is to hand down to the individual the values and convictions it expects him to parrot. I give the main link for this item to a column by Michelle Malkin about a more minor but still worrying attempt to use a message from President Obama to elementary schools students as a kind of propagandistic tool to elicit support for his agenda. Malkin earns the main link because she connects this story to the whole leftist theory and practice of propaganda, with Barack Obama's old friend and fellow education "reformer" Billy Ayers as the crucial link. "Why Parents Don't Trust Educator-in-Chief<http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=336870029210101>," Michelle Malkin, *Investor's Business Daily*, September 3 Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama…. This same "Do Something" ethos infected the US Department of Education teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama's speech—until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to "help the president." Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country—circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts…. Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers' pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program's first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy…. Ayers preached his education-as- "social justice" agenda to his "comrades" at the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, three years ago: "This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President (Hugo) Chavez…. "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!" This is why informed parents do not trust the Educator-in-Chief and his "comrades." *back to top* <#12383dab914daf8e_TOC> ------------------------------ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
