Healthcare: Cutting-edge with blunted instruments
Thursday, February 25, 2010
TODAY’S PRE-SCRIPTED WHITE HOUSE event, just across Pennsylvania Avenue in Blair House (pictured left), has repeatedly been labeled, in quaint old-media terms, the “televised healthcare summit”.
As opposed to just any old plain “healthcare summit”, that is. And sometimes an eager headline-writer or copy-editor has added the extra, presumably pulse-quickening adjective “live!”.
The event may be bi-partisan in its announced intentions -- and the Obama Administration’s contribution to the pre-scripting, its publication (giving us 72 hours reading-time) of the President’s own finally-emerging wish-list of detailed reforms, did certainly embrace some Republican-friendly elements. It talked, after all, of cutting back the proposed tax on high-priced, so-called “Cadillac” health plans, and the inclusion (maybe) of tort-reform covering medical-malpractice suits.
However, looking non-partisan, whether it’s out of genuine desire to work across the aisle or it's a tactical maneuver to shift blame onto Republicans for a forthcoming failure, is one thing – being all-inclusive and open (in the way that’s supposedly signalled by inviting in those TV cameras, for instance) is quite another thing.
We have to ask: What is “live” about the public’s role here? Oh sure, in a “televised summit” they can watch the political theater as it plays out – but can they participate? Where’s the active involvement that our increasingly communications-savvy media audiences have grown to expect?
Where, even more to the point, is the interactive involvement, that the Obama campaign of 2008, dare I recall, so valiantly heralded? We do all remember, don’t we, that hustings promise of “the most transparent government in history”, which was later to be advertised as “an open government plan with public consultation” on the freshly created Presidential website?
The best that those famously tireless - and proudly web-reliant - electoral campaigners, the Obama for America team, can do now, on the eve of the summit, seems underwhelming. With their man installed a full year in the top slot, and with their name minimally altered to Organizing for America they now operate from inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, but they are not exactly engaging their millions of supporters actively - the millions they had, at least, back when ‘getting out the vote’ was their simple mission).
The OFA website – one critical part of their current work that I’ve previously found limp – this week has offered on the healthcare issue a vapid piece by their 27-year-old blogger Erica Sagrans (previously a Nancy Pelosi staffer in the House of Representatives) who puts most of her energy into aggregating published news articles, not providing a route for supporters’ input into the current political process.
The George Soros-funded MoveOn.org (quite differentiated from the White House or the Democratic Party, and poitically still off to the left of both) is scarcely proving any better.
MoveOn may appear more digitally “interactive”, but their current appeal to supporters merely asks them to take part in what they call a “Virtual March” – in reality a rather unconvincing mass fax-in to Senators and Representatives. (Yes – lobbying by fax. Would you say that's a sharp cutting-edge tool amid today's political activism?) They set a target of a million messages arriving on Capitol Hil, a neat but low-ball aim, which they had unsurprisingly accomplished by this morning - not all that impressive for an organization that has claimed 4.5 million active supporters. Plus of course the messages were in that old mass-produced, flat-templated mold (reproduced above right), tricked out with those "personal" extra touches Dear [Senator / Representative X...] and Sincerely, [My Name].
I’d advise Move On’s Justin Ruben and OFA’s David Plouffe - both communications geniuses, by repute - to consider afresh the now very commonplace adage: “There’s an app for that”. They need perhaps to jump aboard the bandwagon whose riders now include “Hello Washington”, a political iPhone application announced this week by its developers, Smarter Apps Inc.
Proclaiming the slogan “Let Your Voice Be Heard”, the app provides biographies of senators and representatives, their bill-sponsoring and voting records, plus their contacts (email and phone) so the user can lobby them directly and individually - by thumb, in real time, and from whatever location that the feeling of outrage, or simple enthusiasm for the democratic process, may strike.
You can follow this column on TWITTER – by clicking HERE
** EVERY WEEK THE CONNECTICUT NPR STATION, WHDD, AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN, with program host MARSHALL MILES **
- Broadcast on Fridays at 7.35am, Saturdays at 4.45pm and Sundays at 6.45pm.
Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE
AN INQUIRY THAT HAS LONG been tracked by THE MEDIA BEAT, the criminal investigation into the CIA’s disposal of 92 videotapes that recorded brutal (or in the Bush era’s official term “enhanced”) interrogations of terrorism suspects, gleaned some extra grist to its mill this week.
In this column I've reported it was the former Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez who actually ordered the tapes’ destruction, but now it turns out there was political cover for the decision as well.
Secret Agency documents only now released, thanks to legal efforts under the Freedom of Information Act (pressed by Amnesty International and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice based at New York University) show that in February 2003 the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by its Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, heard all about the Agency’s plan to destroy the tapes - and raised no objection.
The committee’s boldest assertion of Congressional oversight came when the chairman heard that the tapes showed one suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, being not only "waterboarded" but also threatened at close quarters with a gun and with a high-speed power drill. “Senator Roberts winced”, according the official record of the meeting.
It’s good to know what brave souls uphold our Constitution’s safeguards in the Capitol – and just how they behave behind closed doors, away from the “televised summits”.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -