Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent reprints President Obama’s remarks from a fundraiser Thursday night. They’re worth pondering, because the remarks amount to a pretty perfect distillation of Obama’s recent fecklessness. Naturally, Sargent is encouraged because Obama is on board with the notion of “false balance.” For years now, liberal bloggers such as Sargent have been pushing the notion that Democrats can’t muster the necessary popular support for their agenda because the media reports each new political development as if there are two sides to every story, instead of reporting when one side is right on the factual merits and the other is wrong. The implicit assumption behind “false balance” is that that liberals are right about all the major policy questions.
All the way back in 2012, liberal scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann wrote a book that amounted to an extended hissy fit about false balance. The arguments then, as they are now, were wanting and unsubstantiated. All of these complaints boil down to frustration that the media is are less effective at imposing a center left consensus on the proles than they used to be. And so they demand the media be more strident and paper over legitimate points of disagreement. These attempts at silencing debate are so ham-handed and obvious it further erodes the media’s credibility. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s easy to see why this argument appeals to the “reality has a liberal bias” partisans. But it’s astonishing to see the leader of the free world embracing arguments about “false balance” without realizing how petulant it sounds. The president actually attempts to demonstrate how comparitively reasonable he is, as opposed to those polarizing Republicans, by saying, “Health care — we didn’t suddenly impose some wild, crazy system. All we said was let’s make sure everybody has insurance.”
This is apparently in reference to Obamacare, the 2,200 page law which has had massive technical and political implementation failures spawning multiple criminal and federal investigations. This is the president talking about a health care reform that’s never had public support, despite remaking one-sixth of the economy. It was a bill that was only railroaded through thanks to an appallingly blatant buying votes. It’s legislation that has been repeatedly and lawlessly amended ex post facto in a desperate attempts to fix its massive problems, many of which were warned about well in advance. And finally of note, the president’s assertion that the Obamacare’s modest goal was to “make sure everybody has insurance” is just a few months after he was forced to grovel before American people because he repeatedly lied to millions about their existing policies remaining intact.
I, for one, reject the false choice of false balance. But if there is a single American, let alone a Republican member of Congress, that wakes up every day and “repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people,” well, I encourage them to read the President’s remarks in full and feel appropriately shamed:
“They, so far, at least, have refused to budge on bipartisan legislation to fix our immigration system, despite the fact that every economist who’s looked at it says it’s going to improve our economy, cut our deficits, help spawn entrepreneurship, and alleviate great pain from millions of families all across the country.
“So the problem…is not that the Democrats are overly ideological — because the truth of the matter is, is that the Democrats in Congress have consistently been willing to compromise and reach out to the other side. There are no radical proposals coming out from the left. When we talk about climate change, we talk about how do we incentivize through the market greater investment in clean energy. When we talk about immigration reform there’s no wild-eyed romanticism. We say we’re going to be tough on the borders, but let’s also make sure that the system works to allow families to stay together…
“When we talk about taxes we don’t say we’re going to have rates in the 70 percent or 90 percent when it comes to income like existed here 50, 60 years ago. We say let’s just make sure that those of us who have been incredibly blessed by this country are giving back to kids so that they’re getting a good start in life, so that they get early childhood education…Health care — we didn’t suddenly impose some wild, crazy system. All we said was let’s make sure everybody has insurance. And this made the other side go nuts — the simple idea that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, nobody should go bankrupt because somebody in their family gets sick, working within a private system.
“So when you hear a false equivalence that somehow, well, Congress is just broken, it’s not true. What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”
