Can we ratchet down the rancor in the debate about health care reform?
It’s one thing for angry citizens concerned about the federal government getting involved in health care to attend town hall meetings and give hell to elected officials. Giving hell to elected officials is something Americans need to do more often, although I’d prefer to see them turn incumbents out of office and elect candidates from parties that don’t begin with the letters “D” or “R.”
But it’s quite another to accuse President Barack Obama of wanting to snuff our grandmamas. Or — as one inspired but, I suspect, somewhat demented soul actually did — hold up a sign of Obama with an Adolf Hitler-style mustache drawn across his upper lip.
Clever stuff this is not. It’s called crossing the line that separates legitimate dissent and civil discourse from pathetic demagoguery and below-the-belt cheap shots. It smacks of the kind of thing some liberals did to President George W. Bush for eight years.
No matter what you think of our former president, the record is clear that George Walker Bush was the victim of some terrible cheap shots when he was in office. Remember when rapper Kanye West went on television during the Hurricane Katrina crisis and told the nation “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”?
To paraphrase a line from the hilarious novel “A Confederacy of Dunces,” how do you get through to a cretin with a mind like West’s? The man who appointed not just the first black secretary of state, but the first TWO black secretaries of state, not liking black people? The man who had one of the most diverse Cabinets in presidential history?
As if West’s unnecessary and uninformed dig weren’t enough, some people changed it. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” soon became “George Bush doesn’t like black people,” an allegation every bit as stupid and false as the one West uttered.
But West wasn’t the worst offender. That honor, or, more appropriately, disgrace, goes to officials at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chief among them was NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond, who used every annual convention of the organization as a platform for one of his notorious, highly partisan “nonpartisan” attacks on Bush and the Republicans.
In one speech, Bond accused Bush of appointing Cabinet members from “the Taliban wing” of American politics. In another he accused Bush of wanting to repeal the 14th Amendment, as if presidents actually have that power. When the Internal Revenue Service wanted to investigate whether the NAACP was the Democratic National Committee hit squad that it actually is, rather than the nonpartisan group it claims to be, Bond went into his self-righteous victim mode.
Even worse was the 2000 “issue ad” the NAACP National Voter Fund ran just before the presidential election. When Bush was governor of Texas, three white racists put a chain around the neck of a black man named James Byrd and dragged him to death.
All three were tried and convicted; two were sentenced to death and one to life imprisonment. But for some, they deserved an even greater punishment: being charged with a hate crime.
Bush, being one of those silly Americans who felt two death sentences and a life sentence was far greater punishment than any on the books for committing a “hate crime,” didn’t support hate crimes legislation.
So what did the folks at the NAACP National Voter Fund do? Why, come up with an ad showing a pickup truck dragging a chain, with a voice-over from Byrd’s daughter claiming that Bush’s failure to support hate crimes legislation was like seeing her father murdered all over again.
When Bush opposed an admissions policy at the University of Michigan that was clearly racially discriminatory, Rep. John Conyers and Jesse Jackson accused him of wanting to return blacks to the days of Plessy v. Ferguson. The latest cheap shots against Obama prove that those prone to handing out cheap shots span the political spectrum.
There are cogent arguments to be made against the federal government getting involved in the health care business. (My favorite is that I’m not too impressed by the results of the federal government getting involved in education.) Opponents need to attack the idea, not the man who supports it.
Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
