Obama's Health Care Hard Sell
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, July 20 2009
Organizing for America, the president's field wing of the Democratic National Committee, has begun airing TV spots calling for Senators to get behind the push for a massive overhaul of the health care system. The 30-second spot is called "It's Time, Senators." It features Americans telling their personal health care stories, a favored technique in Obama-land, and drawing a line in the sand about the need for immediate action on health care. The ads are targeted to the home states of both key Republican senators and a handful of Democrats who have raised questions about parts of the president's plan. Politico reports that the ads will air in states including Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Ohio. (Watch it here.)
Notably, OFA's health care hard sell is getting some high-profile backup this week -- in the form of the president. President Obama has been recording a weekly video address since the days of the transition; the mini addresses, which generally last in the ballpark of five or six minutes, vary between dry state-of-the-union recaps of this week in America to more spirited takes on what faces the president and the country.
But in this week's YouTube-hosted address, Obama is showing more fire in the belly than has been seen in past weekly address. This week, he used his few minutes of direct-to-citizen video to aggressively undercut the arguments of health reform's critics and opponents: "I know that once you’ve seen enough ads and heard enough people yelling on TV, you might begin to wonder whether there’s a grain of truth to what they’re saying. So let me take a moment to answer a few of their arguments." Many of those opposed to health reform, argues the president, have a vested interest in the status quo. And those most vocal in their concern about the bill's impact on the deficit, says Obama, are members of the same crowd that ran up a sizable deficit in recent years. Watch the Obama spot "Health Care Reform Cannot Wait" above or here.