Can Sarah Palin Kill Health Care Reform?

Late last week, Sarah Palin said the president’s plan for health care might kill her baby and probably some old voters, too. Palin is but one of a chorus of soprano voices spreading the alarm. This is not an accident. Although most political ads have male narrators, since 1964 political consultants have often used women to spread negative messages, especially about sickness and health.

The female chorus spins a tale that the Democrats’ health reform plan will create government “death panels [2]” that will decide whether people, especially the elderly or disabled, deserve medical treatment or should be left to die. The story that Obama’s health care reform would lead to euthanasia started with the work of political consultant Betsy McCaughey. In the Clinton era, McCaughey played a big role in killing the Clinton health proposal with an article in the New Republic for which the magazine later recanted and apologized. [3]. This time around, McCaughey looked through the bills making their way through Congress and found a provision allowing Medicare [4] to pay for “advanced care planning consultation” between a patient and a doctor, hospital, or hospice. She reframed this humane and innocuous provision in an op-ed in the New York Post [5] and then all over conservative radio [6]. Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann spread the word to the faithful on the website Townhall [7]. Palin called Obama’s plan “downright evil” on her Facebook page [8]: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.” Finally, speechwriter and pundit Peggy Noonan brought the story into the mainstream, describing President Obama in the Wall Street Journal [9] and on This Week with George Stephanopolous as “terrorizing” the public.

It is a truism of political advertising that if you want to go negative in a campaign, it’s to your advantage to have a woman tell the voters about the scary bad things your opponent is doing. The modern classic of negative campaigning, Lyndon Johnson’s legendary attacks on Barry Goldwater for risking a nuclear holocaust, may mark the first appearance of a female voice in any campaign ad [10], ever. The second of the two 1964 ads showed a little girl licking an ice cream cone while a maternal voice described how nuclear testing produced poison that could end up in children’s ice cream. Goldwater opposed the treaty to stop the testing, the female narrator continued, even though nuclear bombs put stuff in the air “that can make you die.”

Since that debut, almost every election cycle has featured female-driven attack ads. Bob Dole used a female narrator to make Bill Clinton out to be just short of a drug dealer. Elizabeth Dole had a woman attack her Democratic opponent in 2008 for not believing in God. In 2000, Republicans used a woman to characterize Al Gore as a slippery quick-change artist: "There's Al Gore reinventing himself on television again." In 2004, the Democrats deployed the female voice to intone ominously that “95 percent of containers coming into America go uninspected. But in the first debate, George Bush said we can't afford to fix it … And on the war on terror, Bush said: ‘I don't think you can win it.’ Not with his failed leadership. It's time for a new direction.”

In a recent book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen [11], Philip Howard describes the superiority of female voices in delivering frightening and negative messages. In a head-to-head test on behalf of a lobby group, a PR firm put two identical attack ads in front of an online focus group. While the focus group found the attack ad with the male narrator to be too negative, it found the attack ad narrated by the female narrator tough yet acceptable. As Republican consultant Tony Blakely put it describing the anti-Gore narrator he called his “hatchet lady” in 2000 [12], she "can turn a phrase or stick a knife in with the best of them," and "she can also be sweet and nice." Other research shows [13] that people see female candidates as more moderate and more ethical than men with similar views—call it the League of Women Voters effect. So the negativity female politicians like Palin deploy probably is not perceived as so partisan and strategic.

The female voice is particularly effective in the health care arena. Even after 40 years of feminism, when children are sick, they are cared for primarily by their mothers [14]. And the adults storming the Democrats’ town hall meetings were raised when women did even more of the child care than they do today. So a woman, especially a mother, is a familiar figure to be warning about sickness and other health-related danger: Bundle up! You’ll catch your death! To be sure, there are exceptions to any rule. But to test the power of this cultural role, think about how weird it would have been had Newt Gingrich stood up and said that he’s afraid Barack Obama will kill his baby (rather than simply endorsing Palin’s statements, as he did on This Week With George Stephanopolous last Sunday).

For all of these reasons, the Palin and Sisters quartet is effective. But theirs is a risky strategy. It cashes in on some pretty silly sex-role stereotypes about how women are nicer political players. And using mother figures to scare grown citizens is infantilizing. Instead of big strong tea party revolutionaries intimidating their woozy senators and representatives, the euthanasia crowd looks more like, well, panicked children.