News & Politics
Can Sarah Palin Kill Health Care Reform?
How conservatives use women to make their attacks.
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” 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.. This time around, McCaughey looked through the bills making their way through Congress and found a provision allowing Medicare 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 and then all over conservative radio. Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann spread the word to the faithful on the website Townhall. Palin called Obama’s plan “downright evil” on her Facebook page: “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 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, 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.”
Linda Hirshman writes "The Princess" column for Double X and is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Before she retired, she taught Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.
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By: njteacher | Sat, 08/15/2009 - 23:09
Sarah Palin speaks off the top of her head, sucks most of her ideas right out of her thumb, looks for other ideas among extreme right talking points. She isn't a liar because she really does believe the crap that's spewing from her guts...Palin chooses to know nothing from other perspectives because she would then have to read and research and do something she's incapable of...some serious critical thinking.
It's quite right to question authority and actively participate in debate. But, that isn't what is happening at these Town Hall Meetings. The meetings are being mobbed by people who've put their brains in Time Out. The right-wing commentators and propogandists are leading the fear-mongering front in a thoroughly dishonest, unknowledgable and unAmerican attempt to obstruct and create mayhem. Perhaps the worst of what's going on is that the media is giving more attention to the mayhem than it is to the careful scrutiny of facts and issues that we want journalism to give attention to.
Why does the extreme Right use women to spread misinformation? Because in that political camp, women are not really a respected part of society...they just very simply are the gender to be used.
The US media is part of the
By: Usama3 | Fri, 08/14/2009 - 15:47
The US media is part of the corporate establishment. They have no interest in the health of people. They don't report a lot of things and neglect to investigate a lot of things that the people need to know about.
You have to develop a sense of knowing that transcends the media.
Good luck.
Palin v. Dr. Emanuel, who knows more about health care?
By: PGofHSM | Fri, 08/14/2009 - 13:15
Notice also that most of these women's attacks are on men, who have to respond carefully in order to avoid looking like big bullies who beat up on girls.
Those against Ezekiel Emanuel, claiming that he is pro-euthanasia and would deny health care to children with cerebral palsy, are probably the most despicable. Anyone in bioethics has heard of Dr. Emanuel primarily for his advocacy AGAINST legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Also, he has a sister with cerebral palsy, whom his parents adopted after his father (also Dr. Emanuel) discovered her condition at a well-baby checkup, and he never has said that she and children like her should be denied health care.
Unfortunately, Palin has no embarrassment about invoking her children, especially her baby Trig, when doing so will help her make a political point geared to reach people emotionally.
Hear hear!
By: nagatuki | Thu, 08/13/2009 - 14:15
I agree entirely; I would like to think most people in America do. I am sickened by the lies and manipulation by the Right of those least educated and it makes me want to vomit.
Dems need to start calling people out as liars, including the crazy people showing up and crying about their "lost America." Please; it's lucky I'm not a politician because I'd laugh in their faces and say, yeah, well, now you know how it felt when Bush was dragging our name through the mud, bringing America to its proverbial knees in the face of the world.
Now Obama's here to fix it, so shut your face and let us do our jobs! : )
NO THEY WON't
By: Queen Alli | Thu, 08/13/2009 - 10:08
Every single woman named is a pathological liar!! Only a very small share of Americans think these women are intelligent and credible. If I wasn't afraid of being blocked from commenting, I would throw out some nasty expletives to describe all of these women and the media that never, ever calls them out for what they are. I'm disgusted, completely disgusted at the level of ignorance that flows out of their mouths and the media actually gives them the benefit of the doubt. Forgetting that their obligation is to provide the facts and to challenge lies not perpetuate them. Is Obama a citizen? Is Obama a socialist? Can Sarah Palin be president? Will health care kill your grandmother? OF COURSE NOT! But what does the media do? They bring on "experts" and "analysts" to have a debate about it. Thanks media, for dumbing down America.