A leetle bit disingenuous? (ap photo)
Oh, come on now. Modern American politics boasts a proud tradition of the canned event and phony protest — did anyone read Bonfire of the Vanities? During the last administration, the White House used “rally squads” at President Bush events to cluster around potential demonstrators and shout, “USA! USA!”
President Obama loves a political set piece. At a recent health care town hall in Virginia, aides helpfully pointed out their pre-screened member of the audience to the president. She wept and told her story, he hugged her. She was also a volunteer for his Organizing for America grass roots political group. He later moved on to answer questions from the audience chosen by his staff.
And let’s not even talk about the 2001 recount.
Startled members of Congress are being confronted back in their home districts by irate citizens angry about health care reform. Are these protests part of a cynical campaign by a private group to disrupt and influence the process? White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called out Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.
“They’ve bragged about manufacturing, to some degree, that anger,” Gibbs said. “I think you’ve got somebody who’s very involved — a leader of that group that’s very involved in the status quo, a CEO that used to run a health-care company that was fined by the federal government $1.7 billion for fraud. I think that’s a lot of what you need to know about the motives of that group.”
The DNC is running ads, claiming the groups are trying to “destroy President Obama.”
The RNC is responding with an audible snort: “In a remarkable example of callousness, the White House and Democrats have reduced the concerns and opinions of millions of Americans to ‘manufactured’ and have labeled them as ‘angry extremists,’ for voicing their opposition to President Obama’s government-run health care experiment,” said party spokeswoman Gail Gitcho.
Maybe we’re just cynical.
