Bring In The Stunt Groom

So today was a very busy outside of the house day. Most of our gardening done and the Junior Logician is off visiting his grandmother so the Logical Husband and I spent most of the day at the farmers market and walking the dogs and taking pictures of the capital area and basically just enjoying an absolutely splendid early summer day in Utah. As a result, I didn't get to any of my emails until very late today. One of the daily must reads is my electronic version of the New York Times. They honestly do have some decent stories....unless they are reporting on President Obama and then the love fest starts.

It was a bit like planning the dream wedding only to have a hurricane rip away the chapel roof as you make your way down the aisle. ABC News and the White House probably thought they had scored a coup in arranging “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” a prime-time opportunity (with a followup session on “Nightline”) for Barack Obama to explain his health care proposal to the voters and for ABC to monopolize an hour-plus with the most famous man in the world. And then came Iran. And Mark Sanford.

Wait - Mark Sanford??? The story broke on Sanford before the President's hour long market re-rollout (because the program has been out for a while now). If he had mentioned the latest trio of celebrity deaths (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson) I could maybe see making a case for it. But then again how could the "most famous man in the world" be overshadowed by a mere electon or a couple of celebrity deaths.

And, well, there was the fact that it was about health care reform. The result: the 10 p.m. show drew 4.7 million viewers, or nearly 3 million fewer than a competing repeat of CBS’s “CSI: New York” and less than half what the evening’s top draw, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” attracted in the previous hour. Well, could the president’s plan have got a second-day bump at America’s water coolers? Not likely.

Oh OK - there are the obligatory references to Farrah and MJ...Oh course there is no mention of the real news like the pending vote on Cap and Trade but then again who cares about climate change...RIGHT????

So who did tune in? Certainly more than a few people who are simply curious or worried about the future of their insurance plans, as well as a few us who are paid to pay attention and, of course, bloggers, who are simply masochists for this kind of thing.

Not this blogger - I was engaged in my weekly Wednesday volunteer activity with 4H. However, the Opiniator was gracious enough to provide us with a wrap up of the blogosphere's reaction to the whole thing. After quoting the ABC chief and the Business and Media Institute's reactions to it, the Opinator gets to the meat/light supper/salad of the reactions.....

Scarecrow at FireDogLake’s Oxdown Gazette, however, thinks the network lured the president into a devilish trap:

For its part, ABC insisted on having Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, instead of informed, qualified health care experts, guide the conversation. That was a mistake, but not the worst of ABC’s offensive conduct.

Sawyer’s main contribution was to introduce her own uninformed biases/opinions in framing issues and introducing questioners. Gibson’s primary role was to reveal his own misconceptions and then literally read talking points from a Republican letter — an obvious ransom extracted after days of Republican whining about giving the President air time on a critical public issue.

Gibson’s other role was to interrupt the President every few minutes to announce a commercial break. The all too frequent commercial interruptions served as an apt metaphor for how private commercial interests demand our attention and extract their profits while limiting our ability to discuss critical public policy issues.

Emphasis mine...Damn those pesky commercial breaks! Maybe Scarecrow would have been happier if Donald Trump had just purchased this hour instead of "buying" Monday Night Raw - then he could have run it commercial free (as he did last Monday night). Then we could treated to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson starting the hour with the intro "Can you SMELL what Barack is cookin'?" Then all Charlie and Diane would need to worry about doing is bowing in proper deference to the President lest they suffer a three count and be "traded" to MSNBC.

The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik thinks the problem wasn’t the message, but the medium:

Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: ABC News did not give President Barack Obama a free pass in its prime-time special Wednesday night to sell his plan for a radical overhaul of the health care system.

There were people in the town hall setting who asked pointed questions, and if you listened very closely, it was obvious after a while that Obama did not have any very good answers when it came to specifics. Furthermore, anchorman Charles Gibson, who moderated the discussion, asked solid follow-up questions of the president.

But, ultimately none of that mattered much, because the majority of viewers can’t or don’t listen very closely when such vast amounts of information, opinion and statistics are thrown around as they were Wednesday night on ABC. Television does not work like that. In the manner that TV does work, Obama had his way from early morning to latenight on ABC Wednesday to push his agenda for massive social change on healthcare. In short, he owned ABC’s airwaves.

Zurawick is correct in that the media was part of the problem but I don't think he gets the "why". Most people turn on the television to tune out. With few exceptions (like political junkies) people use television to escape their daily lives - that's one reason why the moniker "the idiot box" has been used to describe the media almost from day 1.

The Opinionator then quotes Jake Tapper's and my dear friend Ed Morrissey's posts on the subject as well as a response to Ed from Pete Able at the Moderate Voice (for the record I do think calling that exchange Obama's "Dukakis moment" was a bit of a stretch Ed). He also quoted a rather common sense proposal from Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz....

We should create a legal requirement that political elites have to use the same system they foist on everyone else. They should have to wait for hours in doctors’ offices. They should have to wait weeks or months for tests. They should be fobbed off on emergency rooms if they get sick over the weekend. They should be denied any Hail Mary test, medication or procedure. They should get the entire politically-managed health-care experience.

This standard should extend to all elected officials, political appointees and their immediate families.

Such a law would create a built-in feedback loop that would prevent politicians from ignoring the health of the people.

However, the common sense quote of the piece comes from my BTRadio partner in punditry Jazz Shaw (again at the Moderate Voice).

The President once again trotted out the same quote I’ve heard repeatedly when he’s been asked about competition in the private industry. He wants to be “absolutely clear” that if you have a health plan you like, you can keep it! Of course you can keep it. But will you? If your current plan through your employer costs you a couple hundred dollars per month, like mine does, and suddenly there’s a government run plan available that promises roughly the same level of coverage for one hundred bucks per month, how many of you will stay with your old plan? I don’t see why I would. I’d like to save more than one thousand dollars per year, wouldn’t you? Sounds great, but then what happens to this huge industry and all of its various employees when most of us bail out? Is American health insurance, as an industry, too big to fail?

That is something that Jazz and I discussed on our show last Wednesday because that IS the million dollar question. IF the "public option" is so much cheaper than the private option to the point where Americans dump their private insurance en masse will we then have to bail out the insurance industry the way we bailed out the automobile industry or the financial industry? I understand that not all of those employees of the current insurance industry will probably not lose their jobs, but easily one half will and those that don't lose their jobs will grossly under-employed. What will THAT do to our economy? What kinds of jobs will President Obama "create" to replace the lost insurance industry jobs? More fast food jobs? More road repair jobs? The people that are losing these insurance jobs are not people who can repair roads or dig trenches.....and that is the dirty little secret of government job creation. It is a secret that NO POLITICIAN will tell you - but anyone who has worked in a government job, knows exactly what I am talking about.....