The Real Problem with Firedoglake's Latest Attack on "ObamaCare" Is its Dishonesty

The Real Problem with Firedoglake's Latest Attack on "ObamaCare" Is its Dishonesty

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 3:46 PM on January 17, 2010.

Their new ad plays on people's ignorance of the details of various policies.

You've probably gotten wind of this online fracas over Firedoglake's latest attack-ad on Obama and the Dems over health-care. It's part of a larger dust-up within the "liberal blogosphere" since the 2008 election over how to adapt to a new environment.

There's been a lot of cross-talk throughout, it seems to me, with FDL's supporters saying that they're providing a valuable service by trying to push the Dems to the left, and most of their critics taking the line that pushing is fine and great but their tactical decisions on how and whom to push (and with whom to collaborate) leave much to be desired.

As Bob Cesca wrote, "Look, I'm all for accountability, but there's a way to do it smartly. This isn't smart. It's hamfisted and politically infantile." John Cole added:

And if you are going to come in here defending this nonsense, telling us they are doing a valuable service by pushing the Overton window to the left, spare me. You don’t move the window to the left adopting right wing frames. You just validate what the wingnuts are saying. [Ed note: link added]

For the record, I agree with the critics. But for a variety of reasons, I don't really want to weigh in on the debate over strategy and tactics.

My problem with the ad, which appears below, is its dishonesty.

Its take-away is a big, fat lie; the FDLers, counting on people's ignorance of some rather complicated health-care proposals, are intentionally misleading their readers. I don't have a problem with going after Obama and the Dems with a certain amount of ferocity, but it's saddening when ostensibly liberal people try to score political points -- or earn a little street-cred -- by muddying some already murky waters in order to appeal to people's emotions rather than their intellect.

The ad targets the so-called "Cadillac Tax" on high-value health policies, a policy I oppose and would join them in criticizing honestly any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The message is crystal-clear: Obama is pushing the same policy that he bashed John McCain for advocating during the 2008 election. Or at least a substantially similar one.

That goes beyond "framing" to outright intellectual dishonesty.

McCain would have eliminated the entire employer deduction for health benefits, deregulated the private insurance industry so companies could simply move their offices to the states with the easiest regulations, and then given every American family a $5,000 tax credit to purchase crappy high-deductible insurance plans (an average employer-furnished family plan cost for around $9,000 at the time). There was some talk too of "tort reform" and electronic records. And McCain would have expanded funding for existing state-based "high-risk" pools, for people who couldn't get insurance on the private market.

That was it -- there were no public exchanges, no collective insurance pools for those without access to large-group insurance, no subsidies for the poor and lower middle-class, no life-time or annual out-of-pocket caps, no bans on recissions, no payment reforms, no requirements that insurers cover preventive care, no mandate (love it or hate it), no requirement that employers pick up at least part of the cost of their workers' coverage, etc.

The compromise being worked out by Congressional Dems right now would do those things, but it wouldn't even come close to eliminating the tax deduction on health benefits across-the-board as McCain's plan would have. It would only be partially financed by capping the deduction at a relatively high amount.

So you have health-care reform proposals that are simply two different animals -- as different as night and day, as anyone who cares to look at them in even cursory detail will see clearly. Yes, it's technically accurate to say that both would impose some sort of tax burden on health benefits -- on a small number of people in one instance and everyone in the other. But it's also grossly misleading.

Imagine two politicians talking about their respective visions for education. One wants to privatize the schools, offer everyone a voucher they can drop at a private school of their choice and let the hidden hand of the free-market educate our kids. The other one says that's wrong -- we need new investments in the public schools so kids in different neighborhoods have the same access to good teachers and the latest learning materials in small classrooms. Both policies might result in new taxes for education, but only someone with a poor understanding of education policy -- or someone being really dishonest -- would suggest the two approaches were similar, or that the two politicians were cut from the same stone.

As I wrote the last time FDL confused disingenuous spin with sharp-elbowed rhetoric:

I used to labor under the naive delusion that liberals tended to be rationalists -- sometimes too nerdy in their reliance on factual arguments -- and conservatives were the ones who appealed to our basest emotions, our fears. Thankfully, the health-care debate's set me straight on this.

And here's the thing I don't get: why be dishonest with a policy as politically tone-deaf as levying an excise tax on union auto-workers' health benefits? There's no need. They can take on the proposal on its merits, on its political optics. It's just lazy to attack it by tying it to McCain (and by extension, Bush). And the same thing is true more generally -- there's plenty of room for smart, factual criticism of various aspects of the Dems' health-care schemes.

All this does is further confuse people about what's actually on the table and further the narrative that there isn't a dime's worth of difference who's in power or what their ideological leanings might be. It just stokes generalized anti-governmentalism rather than educating the public on the specifics of the policy debate so that they can stand up for their own interests. It's patronizing.

I know I'm hopelessly naive about this, but I always thought that honest analysis was one of the purposes of an independent (and progressive-minded) alternative media. I still believe, stubbornly perhaps, that we could have these debates in a way that leaves our readers knowing more about the issues rather than less.

One thing's clear: anyone who buys FDL's latest, and thinks Obama and the Dems are recreating McCain's Underwear Gnome health-care plan, is walking away from a respected progressive blog with Fox News-quality information, and that's just sad.

Added: Instead of taking on his arguments -- easily done, I think -- the Firedoglake crew has also launched an ad hominem attack on Jonathan Gruber. Gruber certainly should have disclosed the fact that he has an HHS grant to analyze the economic impact of various health-care reform proposals, but they're once again counting on their readers to be ignorant of the difference between a paid shill like Armstrong Williams making stuff up and an academic like Gruber making arguments with which progressives disagree while receiving a research grant in his field of expertise. Also, this.