“Bring On The Pajama Bashing”: Conservatives Can’t Help But Give Vent To Their Ugliest Impulses And Anxieties
Just as we understand the world through stories, our political narratives often revolve around characters, ordinary people who become momentarily famous as supposedly representative of some policy issue or cultural trend. Sometimes they’re fictional, and sometimes they’re people who have chosen to push themselves into a political debate. But often it’s someone who dips a toe into the political waters, then finds the cameras swinging on to them in what surely is a bracing lesson in the contemporary media’s appetites.
What ensues is a debate about just what this person is supposed to represent. Is she the embodiment of a problem conservatives refuse to solve? Is he the truest of Americans, held down by liberal meddling? Or is this person, down to his or her very soul, everything we want the public to hate about the other side?
I’ve written before about the standard media practice of offering “exemplars,” or ordinary people used as the vehicle through which to tell the story of a policy issue or an event. The kind of political exemplars pushed by the parties aren’t as common, but each one gets much more attention. Last week saw another episode of these exemplar controversies, and certainly one of the oddest ones yet. Despite some of the weird details, it was familiar in the way it wound up: with conservatives showing the worst of themselves. They haven’t seemed to realize that no matter who starts these arguments, the right almost always loses them. That isn’t because liberals are so brilliant at choosing these exemplars, or because liberals control the media in which the argument plays out. It’s because once things get going, conservatives can’t help but give vent to their ugliest impulses and anxieties, driven on by the mistaken belief that all Americans will see things the way they do.
Last week, the pro-Obama group Organizing for America put up a web ad with a photo of a 20-something man wearing pajamas and drinking hot chocolate in what looked like a Christmas-morning scene, to encourage young people to sign up for health insurance. Immediately, many in the conservative media reacted as though just looking at this young fellow had transported them back to the junior high schoolyard where the class bully had called them sissies. The only way to restore their manhood, apparently, was to go after some random kid in a web ad by saying he’s kinda gay.
The National Review‘s Rich Lowry kicked things off with a column imputing to this fictional character, now named “Pajama Boy,” an entire history and a series of character flaws. “He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping,” Lowry wrote. But that was one of the more restrained assaults on Pajama Boy’s masculinity. A writer for the popular conservative site Pajamas Media (so named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the belief that bloggers are just people sitting in their pajamas spouting off, though by now they seem to have changed their stance on pajamas), wrote a piece beginning, “Whatever horrifying condition deprived Pajama Boy of his genitals, I suppose we must be thankful he can’t pass it along to future generations.” He went on to assert cleverly that left-wing academics also “have no genitals” and concluded, “Side with the left long enough, and your genitals fall off. As well they should.” Lowry’s National Review colleague Mark Steyn wrote, “Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.” Don’t even ask what happened on Twitter.
It should go without saying that if you see a photo of a somewhat nerdy-looking young man and your first impulse is to shout, “Gay! Gay! That guy’s gay!” then maybe you should do some hard thinking about where this powerful sexual anxiety comes from.
So what happens when this is all said and done? Democrats put up a web ad, then conservatives blow a gasket and end up looking shrill and homophobic. This kind of pattern has repeated itself many times. Recall Sandra Fluke, the activist who became briefly famous when she testified before Congress about a controversy over insurance coverage for birth control at the university where she was a law student. Though she said nothing about her personal life, conservatives immediately attacked her for believing that women should have the right to a sex life. Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful conservative media figure in America, called called her a “slut” and a “prostitute,” and said, “if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” And they wonder why there’s a gender gap.
It isn’t that Democrats aren’t willing to criticize the exemplars Republicans elevate. You remember Joe the Plumber, whom John McCain loved so dearly he brought him up in a debate with Obama, praised him in stump speeches, and even produced an ad with salt-of-the-earth Americans proclaiming “I’m Joe the Plumber” as though he was Spartacus. Liberals certainly chuckled when Joe turned out to not actually be a licensed plumber, and took some satisfaction when he failed to turn his celebrity into a career as a lawmaker, losing his 2012 campaign for an Ohio congressional seat by a razor-thin 49-point margin. Liberals were happy to note that the small business owner who starred in a Mitt Romney ad attacking Barack Obama for “you didn’t build that” actually got nearly a million dollars in government loans and contracts.
But there’s a particular venom that characterizes the approach many conservatives take to the liberal exemplars. For example, it’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist driving to Baltimore to poke around the home and business of the family of a 12-year-old boy who advocated for the S-CHIP funding that helped his family afford medical treatment for him and his sister after a serious car accident. But that’s what conservative celebrity Michelle Malkin did in 2007, in an attempt to prove that the boy’s family didn’t deserve the help. It certainly seems as though whenever we meet a new ordinary citizen liberals are touting, the first thought some conservatives have is, “This person must be destroyed.”
There’s also often a disconnect between the attempt to undermine the exemplar and the policy argument conservatives are making. Let’s say Malkin had succeeded in uncovering some dirt on that young boy’s family. What would that have shown—that poor children shouldn’t get health coverage? It was reminiscent of something we learned more about this week, one of the most well-known exemplars in American political history: the “welfare queen” whose bilking of the system Ronald Reagan touted as proof that poor people didn’t deserve help from the government. While liberals believed for many years that Reagan had simply made up the tale (like so many others), Slate has the fascinating backstory of Linda Taylor, who not only defrauded welfare in the 1960s and 70s but may have also committed multiple acts of murder and kidnapping. The problem with Reagan’s use of her story is that he wasn’t arguing that it showed that we needed to do more to crack down on fraud so con artists couldn’t take advantage of the system. Reagan was arguing that this career criminal was actually a typical welfare recipient, and her story showed that benefits should be cut for everyone.
Reagan’s “welfare queen” story had real political potency. These days though, conservatives are more likely to get worked up over some individual liberal (or the photo of someone they presume is a liberal) and eventually find that the public doesn’t share their excitement. Just like they thought Joe the Plumber was going to win them the 2008 election, I guess they think a photo of a guy wearing pajamas is going to get Americans mad at Barack Obama and make them not want to get health insurance. To which liberals should probably respond: Go ahead. Keep telling us about how liberal men aren’t as manly and strong as you are, and how single women are a bunch of sluts, and how racial minorities are ungrateful moochers. How’s that been working out for you lately?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 23, 2013
“What Obamacare Death Spiral?”: So Sorry Republicans, The Rumors Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act have been terrified for months now that a combination of a botched online enrollment system, terrible press, and Republican sabotage could send the individual market part of the new system into the much-discussed “death spiral” where a disproportionately large population of older and sicker enrollees would produce very high premiums, which would in turn repel younger and healthier eligibles even more, creating a self-perpetuating disaster.
At Wonkblog today Sarah Kliff reports some research from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicating that fears of a “death spiral” are significantly overblown:
The rumors of an Obamacare death spiral have been greatly exaggerated. So say Larry Levitt, Gary Claxton and Anthony Damico, experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation who have put together a new brief analyzing what would happen if young adults snubbed the Affordable Care Act. Even if young people sign up at half the rate the administration hopes for, it would nudge premiums up only by a few percentage points, their report says.
“When you do the math, it matters, but not nearly as much as the conventional wisdom suggests,” Levitt says….
If young adults (those under 35) were 25 percent less likely than the rest of the population to sign up for Obamacare, they would represent 33 percent of exchange enrollees — rather than 40 percent. This means there would be fewer young people to subsidize older insurance subscribers. To make up that difference, the experts estimated, insurers would need to increase premiums by a terrifying … 1 percent. Yes, exactly 1 percent.
Levitt, Claxton and Damico also tested a scenario where young adults are half as likely as older shoppers to enroll. In that case, the younger enrollees would make up only a quarter of the exchange market. Premiums would fall 2.5 percent short of covering subscribers.
Wow. If these numbers are accurate, the widespread assumption (particularly among happy Republicans) that there’s nothing ahead for exchange enrollees beyond “sticker shock” forever could give way to the expectation that Obamacare will eventually be self-stabilizing, at least for most enrollees. That in turn would upset GOP calculations that they can perpetually benefit from Obamacare’s problems without coming up with their own credible “replacement” proposal (the ones we’ve seen so far, which rely on destructive gimmicks like interstate insurance sales and state-run high-risk pools, while vastly disrupting employer-based coverage, just aren’t credible once you get beyond the slogans).
A whole lot of GOP strategery for 2014 and 2016 depends on an Obamacare crash. They might want to start seriously considering a Plan B that isn’t even worse than the pre-Obamacare status quo ante.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 18, 2013
“Kicked To The Curb”: Republicans’ Self-Hatred Swells To The GOP Vs. Its Own Base
Does any modern political party besides the GOP hold a huge segment of its base in contempt? I’ve written a lot about how Republicans have failed to make inroads with Latinos, young voters or women since their 2012 defeat, but what’s really interesting is the way they continue to deride many of their older, white, working-class voters, too.
When Mitt Romney insulted “the 47 percent” of Americans who pay no federal income taxes, he failed to notice that the vast majority of them are white, most of them white seniors, the most reliably Republican voters in the country. A large portion of the people Paul Ryan describes as “takers” – vs. productive “makers” – are likewise older whites. And although Ryan and his party want to turn Medicare into a voucher program – run by exchanges, much like the Affordable Care Act – they tried to hide that fact during the 2012 race because it was hugely unpopular with their base.
The latest insult came from former senator and 2012 presidential runner-up Rick Santorum. On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday Santorum complained that the Affordable Care Act has meant that “sicker, older” people are getting health insurance (h/t Crooks and Liars.) Santorum told Candy Crowley and former Gov. Howard Dean:
Well, let me just add that one of the solutions that President Obama tried to accomplish was to let people keep their own insurance. It turns out that a lot of insurance companies are actually allowing that to happen, and that could cause even more problems for Obamacare, because that means fewer and fewer people getting into the exchanges. And the ones who, at least to date, it’s just facts Gov. Dean, the ones in the system are much older.
I talked to one insurance company today, a third of their enrollees are over sixty years of age. That is not how an insurance system would work, but those are the people signing up and the folks who can keep their plans because they’re more customized and lower cost, will now. And the folks who are going to get into these exchanges are going to be probably sicker, older, and as a result, premiums are even going to go higher.
First of all, it’s not clear Santorum is right about this. Some states are seeing unexpectedly high proportions of younger people sign up for coverage. In Kentucky, 41 percent have been under 35; in California, it’s 22 percent, which is proportionate to their share of the population. Still, the enrollment rate in California is highest for people over 55. That’s not surprising, or permanent: Based on the experience of Massachusetts, older people tend to sign up for coverage first; younger enrollees do it closer to the deadline.
But assuming that Santorum isn’t wrong (admittedly a leap), what is he saying? That people over 60 who don’t have coverage shouldn’t be able to get it? We know these people are white, and presumably – since they’re not eligible for Medicaid, which covers many of the poor and unemployed — they’re working people. But Santorum says “that’s not how an insurance system should work.”
Luckily Howard Dean was there to disagree. “I think it’s great that we’re insuring people who can’t get insurance that are over 55 and 60,” he told Santorum and Crowley. “That’s what this is supposed to do.”
Of course, if insurers are unhappy with their older customers, Rep. Alan Grayson has an answer: his “Medicare for All” bill, which would allow anyone who wanted to to sign up for Medicare instead of a private insurance plan. Back during the ACA debate many liberals wanted to see that option, but it was vetoed by insurance interests. Opening up Medicare to people 55 and older would help stabilize the program – although they’re the older edge of the ACA pool, they’d be younger and healthier subscribers in the Medicare pool – and provide an alternative for those priced out of or under-served by the private market.
Still, the big news this weekend was that the federal website that lets most people access insurance exchanges, Healthcare.gov, is mostly fixed. That’s why Santorum was reduced to railing against those takers in the GOP base. On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace attacked the ACA as “income redistribution.”
And, of course, Santorum insisted that the ACA’s troubles raised questions about “the president’s competence.” Dean wasn’t having that either.
“That’s right-wing talking points against this president,” Dean replied. “From day one, they’ve tried to undermine him as a human being … I lose my patience with this nonsense. I do believe that the facts are going to be determined by what happens on the ground. Three months from now, a lot more people are going to have health insurance, and a lot more people are going to be happy with all this.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 2, 2013
“Turning The Health Care Corner”: The Health Care Talking Points That “Everyone Knows” To Be True Are Due For An Update
Political journalism is sometimes criticized, fairly, for its “pack” mentality. Major news organizations wait for the conventional wisdom to organically take shape, and then the players stick to their scripts, reinforcing an agreed upon consensus. In practically no time at all, there are certain political facts that “everyone knows” to be true.
But soon after, that gets dull, the conventional wisdom invites skeptics, and contrarian instincts kick in. Maybe, the political world starts to wonder, those truths that “everyone knows” aren’t so true after all.
For the last several weeks, the consensus in establishment circles was that the Affordable Care Act’s open-enrollment period was not only a disaster, but a catastrophe that would destroy Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party, the American health care system, and the very idea of progressive governance. Pundits could hardly contain their analogies – this was Obama’s Katrina, Obama’s Iraq, Obama’s Watergate, Obama’s Iran-Contra, and even Obama’s Bay of Pigs.
But the funny thing about narratives is that they’re sometimes fleeting. Ezra Klein suggests today that “Obamacare” may finally be “turning the corner.”
There are increasing reports that HealthCare.Gov is working better – perhaps much better – for consumers than it was a few short weeks ago. “Consumer advocates say it is becoming easier for people to sign up for coverage,” report Sandhya Somashekhar and Amy Goldstein in the Washington Post. “The truth is, the system is getting stronger as it recovers from its disastrous launch,” writes Sam Baker in the National Journal. Applying “was no problem at all, with no delays,” says Paul Krugman.
Reports from inside the health care bureaucracy are also turning towards optimism. People who knew the Web site was going to be a mess on Oct. 1st are, for the first time, beginning to think HealthCare.Gov might work. Data backs them up: By mid-November, the pace of enrollment in the federal exchanges had doubled from what it was in October.
The Obama administration is certainly acting like they believe the site has turned the corner. Somashekhar and Goldstein report that they’re “moving on to the outreach phase, which had taken a back seat as they grappled with the faulty Web site. Next week, the White House will host an insurance-oriented ‘youth summit’ aimed at people ages 18 to 35, an age group whose participation in the health-care law will be critical to its success.”
Why didn’t the White House do this sooner? Because officials didn’t much see the point in directing people to a website that didn’t work. If they’re increasing the website, it’s the result of greater optimism.
Perusing the news this morning, there are more than a few compelling pieces along these lines. The L.A. Times has a terrific article, for example, on “the Obamacare success stories you haven’t been hearing about.” NPR today highlighted some Californians who received cancelation notices – and are thrilled with the results. National Journal made the case yesterday that Obama not only can recover from the troubled rollout; he already has.
Moreover, Greg Sargent has a great piece noting that for all the talk about health care crushing Democrats, there’s a credible argument that the Republican position “is actually a political liability of its own.”
Yes, some of these pieces were written by center-left observers who may be predisposed to hope “Obamacare” succeeds, but note that we weren’t seeing any of these kinds of reports a few weeks ago when the feeding frenzy got underway. On the contrary, Ezra, Greg, and others were openly critical of the administration’s obvious mistakes and missteps as they unfolded.
The conventional wisdom won’t change quickly or easily, but you can almost see the consensus shifting in real time. There are some important issues the administration still needs to address, and failure very much remains an option. For that matter, if it’s a mistake to exaggerate the importance of every piece of bad ACA news, the law’s defenders must be equally cautious about exaggerating the importance of every positive development, too.
But for those stuck in the “Obamacare is and will remain a disaster” story, it’s time for a reality check. The system is improving, enrollment is increasing, more consumers are smiling, horror stories are failing, and health costs are shrinking.
The health care talking points that “everyone knows” to be true are due for an update.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 26, 2013
“No Health Insurance, Just Drink”: Koch Brothers Generation Opportunity Campaign Against Obamacare Is Insanely Irresponsible
This is the strangest P.R. campaign yet against the Affordable Care Act. Generation Opportunity, the Koch-funded group behind the Creepy Uncle Sam ads, is throwing tailgate parties to “educate” young people about the exchanges. Read: To convince young people to forgo health insurance.
The group’s communication director, David Pasch, wrote an email to The Tampa Bay Times describing a drunken event at Saturday’s University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game:
“We rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8’ high balloon bouquet floating overhead. We hired a popular student DJ from UMiami (DJ Joey), set up OptOut cornhole sets, beer pong tables, bought 75 pizzas, and hired 8 ‘brand ambassadors’ aka models with bullhorns to help out.”
Mr. Pasch specified that “student activists,” rather than anyone employed directly by Generation Opportunity, “brought (lots of) beer and liquor for consumption by those 21 and over.”
As a sort of afterthought, he added, “Oh yeah, and we educated students about their healthcare options outside the expensive and creepy Obamacare exchanges.”
According to Think Progress, this isn’t a one-time thing: “The group is touring 20 different campuses this fall in a $750,000 effort to convince college students that they’re better off being uninsured than getting health coverage through Obamacare.”
That’s a lot of money for a campaign that’s not only insanely irresponsible, but also insanely dumb. Generation Opportunity is the old guy at a house party, convinced he can win the cool kids’ respect with booze.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Editors Blog, The New York Times, November 11, 2013
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