A Second City Warning to Obama

[checks-n-balances]

A Second City Warning to Obama
by Michael L. Millenson
The Huffington Post
Posted: July 7, 2009 12:06 PM

Just a few minutes into the Second City comedy troupe's latest show, America: All Better!, the usual japes about the Jesus-like hopes projected onto our 44th president gave way to a quick bit about health care reform. A doctor was telling a woman that her diagnosis gave her only three months to live. When she pleaded for help, he told her that the good news was that Obama's health reform plan meant she was scheduled for her next visit just six months from now.

Bad news for Obama -- the audience laughed.

Conventional wisdom says that the shopworn distortions and deceptions that killed health care reform in the past have lost their sting due to combination of middle-class economic worries and soothing on-message reassurances. Perhaps. But comedy works only when it connects with real anxieties. The fact that Second City comics in the heart of Chicago are successfully playing to GOP-fueled fears of rationing should raise a bright red warning flag at the White House.

Here's another warning sign: I was talking with a liberal physician friend who's spent his career serving people in the kinds of Chicago neighborhoods where Obama worked as a community organizer. But my friend's instant reaction to my optimism about reform was concern: "I hope Obama doesn't just open up the government's checkbook." This from a primary care physician whose patients are overwhelming poorly insured or have no insurance at all! But he's also a middle-class guy with taxes to pay and kids to put through college.

A similar warning sign flashed on the recent ABC News special featuring questions for the president. Pastor David Hattenfield of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cumberland, Maryland rose to address President Obama . He did not ask about the 46 million without health insurance or the estimated 20,000 men and women who die every year -- roughly 55 people every single day -- as a result. Instead, he was concerned about government "taking over" health care and his taxes going up.

More at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-l-millenson/a-second-city-warning-to_b_226435.html

The author is using Second City actors, who are not normally interested in repeating GOP talking points, as an opening example of how those talking points are still out there. They aren't just out there; they overwhelmingly saturate the American populace and countering the propaganda is a major but essential task. It's naive and irresponsible to ignore this fact.

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. Health care reform

is my line in the sand. If Obama does not make the effort to deliver single payer (and it doesn't appear that he is going to do so) then I likely will not support his re-election bid. Same thing is true of my elected representatives. I got nothing against throwing all the sorry bastards out of office.

And, yes, Obama supported single payer before it no longer served his desire for position and the personal power and prosperity it brings. He is a sell out who values the needs and interests of both the health care corporations and himself more highly than those of flesh and blood citizens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE

[Buzz Clik]

2. Warning to Obama? That's a warning to us all about health care reform.

That little bard is the stardard rightwing meme about universal health care -- everybody gets shitty care.

If the audience laughed and they represenet America, give it up.

[checks-n-balances]

3. I agree, it's a warning to anyone concerned

A warning to anyone in congress willing to listen and to Obama, if he would be so incline also to listen.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

4. Second City audiences are primed to laugh at anything they hear.

If it sounds like a punchline it must be a punchline.

That's not to say the meme isn't out there and worthy of concern but I don't think this event is particularly telling.

[checks-n-balances]

5. I agree, but that was only one of the author's examples

And the point I made at the end of my post was that there are way too many people out there who might otherwise be supportive of public health care who are either repeating the GOP propaganda or who are believing it.