Thursday, April 22, 2010

Advice for the Tea Party

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 22, 2010.

Advice for the Tea Party

The Tea Party movement has been active for about a year now, and with the movement's rise comes a lot of questions. Despite the fact that I don't agree with most of the Tea Party's message, they are a continuation of the great American spirit of dissent and protest.

The common use of the Gadsden Flag by Partiers, with its yellow field, coiled rattlesnake, and "Don't Tread on Me" message, is the group's own attempt to link back to our revolutionary heritage.

The Doonesbury cartoon series has noticed, too: When perpetual hippie Zonker attended a Tea Party rally, he heard Partiers chanting "Down with the Tyrants!" Zonker noted they had the same "outasight" message his generation had. Zonker also found common cause with a Partier who was out to "stick it to the man."

The Tea Party, though, has image problems it needs to deal with. I'm sure you've heard these stories:

At a January rally in New Mexico, news reports said that "many" of the Partiers showed up with loaded semi-automatic weapons and holstered pistols. All perfectly legal, but the image this sort of thing projects to the average American, who supports gun rights but is wary of guns, is one of aggression and conflict.

Charges of racism in the Tea Party have also come up again and again. Many examples I cannot repeat here, but this is one: Calling the health care act "white slavery" senselessly and callously belittles the actual slavery the ancestors of some of our black citizens had to endure.

Finally, a common scene depicted at some rallies has the face of President Barack Obama placed over the image of Adolph Hitler. Aside from the fact that nothing Obama's administration has done approaches Nazism, there is Godwin's Law, which states that if you start comparing people to Hitler, the discussion has, by default, gone on too long.

Has the discussion gone on too long?

Last month, my colleague on the right-hand page, Mike Benevento, noted that the Tea Party movement was fragile. The movement, he wrote, "risks fizzling out." Mike noted that the movement had to not only grow from the grass-roots, but it also had to unify nationally. Otherwise, it risked being just a local phenomenon, with no national influence.

I agree with Mike, but his advice must be only part of the movement's long-term survival plan. If it continues to appeal to the fringes of the right wing, the ones who insist on screaming "baby killers!" and "socialists!" and even "Nazis!" at every turn, they will lose any hope of wide appeal.

I've seen this sort of thing happen before, up-close, and on the left. When I was a student at UVM, because of my work on the Vermont Cynic, I was asked by a far-left campus group to help produce their own alternative newspaper. It was called ?The Gadfly, and it contained a fair number of good stories about students working with organizations in Burlington to help the city's poor and down-trodden.

These stories had a real shot of getting more students involved in social action. However, the stories were buried between reprints from Granma International (an English-language newspaper from Cuba, which extolled the virtues of Castro and his Revolution) and the People's World (a communist weekly from New York City). The Gadfly was largely ignored.

The lesson is that a good, positive message of change can easily be derailed by being connected too closely to extreme messages that the common man has no interest in hearing.

The Tea Party's raison d'etre now is to be against the health care law. If that's all it has to hang its hat on, then I don't think the Party has much life left in it. They may help Republicans pick up a few seats in November, but I also think that for every negative message about the law the Republicans and the Tea Party have to offer, there are (at least) two positive stories about how the law will make the average American's health better and more secure.

The movement's other major issue, the raging deficit, is a big concern; but the only way to stop that now would be to leave our troops in a lurch or to allow the bottom to drop out of the economy. Obama has plans to bring our troops home and hopes with the rest of us that the economy is rebounding, bringing us back to the surpluses of the Clinton years.

The Tea Party might be a force for change over the next few years; they just need to be sure what they want to change is worth changing, and that they do it with rational arguments and tempered words.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Correcting health care misinformation

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 8, 2010.

Correcting health care misinformation

My task this week is to write about the new health care law, and you might think that I would be full of praise for the new law and its provisions. But I have something more important to write about — don't get me wrong, I am excited the bill made it through the congressional gauntlet and the President was able to sign it, but I've heard a lot of misinformation about the law that I think has to be addressed, lest that misinformation become "common knowledge".

First, the response of many Republicans to the new law was to launch a campaign to "repeal and replace" the law. Obviously, the minority party does not have the votes to do either yet, but the plan was to get enough votes in Congress in the next election.

I'm not going to say it is outside the realm of possibility, but I think the voter anger that the Republicans will have to tap into to get sufficient numbers, a whopping two-thirds of both houses of Congress, simply won't be there in November — at least not at the level needed to put this plan in motion. I think as people hear more about the law, they will come to agree with its provisions and look forward to them coming into effect.

Republican leaders, initially so keen on "repeal and replace" that it was reported as a new campaign mantra, seem to have already begun to back away from the notion. That's a bit of good news.

Another common misperception, willingly hoisted upon the public by conservative pundits and politicians, is that the law creates "socialized medicine." Socialism is a big dirty word in Washington, and is bandied about with abandon. What the law provides, however, has no resemblance to socialism.

Socialists believe in government take-over of industry. The health care law is no government take-over. Health insurance, for most, is still provided by insurance companies. Doctors are not government employees. Drugs are not produced by government factories. Under the law, the private sector is still a vital part of the health care system.

Anyone who is decrying the law as a socialist take-over is either not aware of what the word means or is deliberately using inflammatory language to scare the public.

Another tidbit playing on peoples' fear is that the law creates a new IRS army, and that one of 16,500 armed agents will be knocking on your doors to see proof that you are properly insured. There will be penalties, eventually, if individuals remain uninsured, and these will likely be assessed at tax time. The personal mandate is necessary for the system to work, to spread the liability. But the law is also quite specific — the IRS may not confiscate assets or property, nor impose jail time, for failure to have insurance.

Simply put, armed agents will not be knocking on your door for failure to comply with the law.

Also in the news of late is word that over a dozen Attorneys General have filed or plan to file suit against the federal government, alleging that the new law is an unconstitutional power grab. Other Attorneys General, with a bit more common sense and legal precedent on their side, have refused to sign on to the effort.

The Supreme Court, in its prior rulings, has said that insurance regulation is an interstate commerce issue that Congress can regulate. Even conservative stalwarts like Justice Antonin Scalia have agreed, if reluctantly, that such regulation is constitutional.

I won't say that all of these cases are political posturing, but some of them surely are; and they won't come cheap. Attorneys General in Kentucky and Arizona said they would be a waste of taxpayer money. Vermont's Attorney General has not even wasted space on his website to announce that he won't join in any such frivolous lawsuits.

The fact is that we now have a health care law in effect. It is not perfect — far from it — but it is a starting point. As its features are phased in over the next few months and the next few years, we will be able to see what's working and what's not and make changes to ensure that the economy can adapt to it. The public, in the meantime, can set its collective mind at ease by checking on what the politicians and pundits are saying, discarding the misinformation, and learning more about what the law actually does.