How Republican Borg Will Obstruct Obama's Health Care Plan

In this age of mass political media, digestible and poll-tested talking points that can be repeated ad nauseum are the currency of the realm.  Normally, you watch enough C-SPAN or read enough Op-Eds and you begin to detect a pattern – working backwards, you realize that these perfect phrasings must have been the work of hours of research and message coordination.  But now that the memo from famed Republican pollster and Frank Luntz on how Republicans can best resist health care reform has leaked, we get to see this process from a new point of view.  We can watch, as one by one, conservatives, talking heads, and politicians see their own speech patterns assimilated by this new anti-reform message like it was the Borg from Star Trek.

Resistance is futile.

First, you can read the memo itself or look at Time.com's summary. Now, let’s go back to Chuck Grassley’s ode to bipartisanship/lament of reconciliation from yesterday.  The part that made the least sense is now much clearer through the lens of Luntz strategy memo.  The weird idea that Grassley was coming up with an alternative plan to defeat the very reform bill that he’s working on with Baucus?  That message is faithful to the Borg-Luntz dictum, “It’s not enough to just say what you’re against. You have to tell them what you’re for. Overt attacks on the Democratic proposals will fail if they aren’t balanced with your solutions.”  When Grassley claimed that the nefarious Democrats destroying the spirit of bipartisanship were Pelosi, Reid, Rahm and a general “Democrats” and was willing to spare Sen. Baucus and President Obama from criticsm (specifically saying it’s “against the wishes” of Obama) is also playing right into Luntz analysis:  “Every time we test language that criticized the President by name, the response was negative—even among Republicans…. If you make this debate about Republicans vs. Obama, you lose.”

Yes, that’s right.  Chuck Grassley has been assimilated.

The House Republican task force on health care has made it known that they’ll be releasing a “Dear Colleague” letter this week.  They've also made it clear that the letter uses as many buzzwords from the Luntz memo as possible. Luntz’s main recommendations are to scare people about rationing, talk about “a government takeover” of health care rather than the less scary phrase “government-run” health care, and pound away on bureaucrats disrupting the doctor-patient relationship (or, specifically, "federal bureaucrats, Washington lobbyists and out-of-touch politicians”).  So check out this sentence from the House Republicans:  “We know that a government takeover of health care will raise taxes, ration care, let government bureaucrats make decisions that should be made by families and doctors, and eliminate the health coverage that more than 100 million Americans currently rely on.” Eerie, right?  It’s like the world’s worst drinking game.

Suffice to say, House Republicans have been assimilated.  The John Birch Society, who now has a headline on its site blazing the words “Obama to Ration Care” has at least been partly assimilated (come on guys, don’t mention Obama… your poll numbers just dropped 20 points!  Have you learned nothing from Luntz?)  It’s sort of breathtaking to watch so many conservatives gradually adapt to the new strategy memo, transitioning their “all over the map” objections into a drone-like hive mind.  And it’s also like suddenly being able to see the levers and wires that make the magic trick possible.

I’ll be writing a lot more about some of the more surprising things in this memo over the next couple of days, but I’ll leave you with this one:  “Americans want solutions, not politics,” says Luntz.  In another section, he elaborates, “If the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless.”  If he's right, then the battle is lost.  Congressional Republicans have had at least two attempts to articulate an alternative health care plan through their budget documents, and whiffed both times.  The House working group designed to come up with an alternative has instead come up with a “Dear Colleague” letter that, for all its Luntz-inspired rhetoric, has no solutions, only a “we’re against reform” sentiment.  And the Luntz memo itself, filled as it is will poll data and manufactured phrases, itself poses no solutions – just politics.

In short, the dynamic is already “President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it.” We have a memo from Frank Luntz to prove it.

(Photo credit:  mharrsch on Flickr.)