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Aug 9, 2009
Politics

I’m still watching This Week with George Stephanopolous from today but something in it struck me so much that I had to write something. Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean are debating health care with George. George raises the question about whether the movement of people coming to townhall meeting is real or contrived, organized or not. I won’t mention the issue of all the Democratic “grassroots” causes that are funded by large donors like George Soros and organized by people who are paid to gather up folks and turn them out, like ACORN. (The only difference is ACORN gets some of your tax dollars to do this.) I just want to highlight this part of the show:

Stephanopolous: And I know your allies, Governor Dean, have been saying that this is all just, you know, paid for, people recruited by lobbyists here in Washington. But you can’t create, you can’t force people to go out to a town meeting. You can’t manufacture that kind of anger, can you?

Dean: Well there uh, there actually is, um, there is a lot of orchestration. There’s the Brian McGuffey memo which actually tells people do what, do what they’re doing, which is sit in the front, jump up and interrupt.

Stephanopolous: He’s got like 23 friends on Facebook though.

There are two things about this that interest me. First is the idea that we are measuring people’s influence now by how many Facebook friends they have. I completely understand George’s point: if McGuffey posts something on Facebook about how to disrupt a town meeting and only 23 people are hearing him, how influential can he really be? I’m not sure whether that’s an ingenious new way to measure influence, or a sign of the apocalypse. But if that’s how we’re doing things these days, then please feel free to add me to your Facebook friends so I can enhance my credibility.

Second is the idea that Howard Dean is going on national television to talk about how these townhalls are contrived, and the proof that he cites of the artificial nature of this national movement is one guy who has 23 people listening to him? Republicans do themselves a disservice when they look at the Code Pink crazies or the 9/11 truthers and paint the entire Democratic party with the crazy brush. Likewise, Dean and other Democrats do themselves a similar disservice when they point to a few cases of people taking advantage of the changing climate against government intrusion into health care to push their agenda, and label all Republicans as zombie tools of the health care industry.

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  1. Benjamin Seghers  •  Aug 10, 2009 @12:10 pm

    Are these angry mobs that are disrupting town-hall meetings really grassroot efforts? When you visit sites like Recess Rally or FreedomWorks, you see they’re nothing but astroturf. They’re being sponsored and organized by large Republic lobby groups and other corporate interests. There’s nothing organic about it.

  2. ProfSwitzer  •  Aug 10, 2009 @5:43 pm

    Perhaps Howard Dean should have used one of them as an example instead. I guess it depends on your definition of “grassroots.” And any definition you come up with will rule out the vast majority of liberal “grassroots” efforts these days too. Health Action Now, an arm of the AARP, which prints signs for people to take to the meetings, is sponsoring and organizing people. Health Care for America Now calls for people to contact their representatives and help pass health care reform; their address is on K Street in Washington with all the other lobbyists. The Obama administration is sending e-mails to people who have donated to his campaign asking them to get out and make sure they help him. Are any of those “organic?” No, they’re “sponsored” and “organized.” It’s irrelevant. People have questions and concerns and want their representatives to hear them. The ones who are yelling are doing themselves a disservice, and the SEIU people roughing up others aren’t helping their cause either. But when representatives can’t answer simple questions about a bill (then say “there is no bill” when in fact there are several of them) that is going to change 1/6 of our economy, and can’t provide any specifics at all, I think it’s understandable for people to get a bit testy.

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