Language of the Healthcare Debate

"Larry King: Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusettes wrapped up a Townhall in Dartmouth, MA. Watch this exchange.

'Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy, why are you supporting it?'

'When you ask me that question, I am gonna revert to my ethnic heritage, and answer your question with a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time? ... You want me to answer the question? As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the first amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table! I have no interest in doing it.' (CNN's Larry King Live)

"Everybody sit down."

"I don't understand this rudeness, what is this... do you think you're persuading people when you're shouting out like that?"

Those are scenes from recent Health Care Townhalls, where people have been invited to share their opinions with elected representatives. But, due to the nature of the interactions, some in the media are questioning whether this is a debate or a circus.

"We're trying to have a debate in this country between two different groups of people who have two completely different sets of 'facts.' We think of political universe as all one thing. Sure everybody has different opinions, but we agree what we're fighting about. It's just not true." (MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show)

“A USA Today/Gallup Poll this week found that most Americans believe the protestors’s sentiments are genuine.”

Sourcewatch is a wiki-style journalism database and defines astroturfing as follows.

“Astroturf refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms.”

Astroturfing, or ‘democracy for hire’ as journalist William Greider called it in his book “Who Will Tell the People” is familiar to many Americans because during the 2008 Presidential Election, the term was applied to activities by the organizing group ACORN.  

But, it’s with regard to the health care town halls that the term has taken off again. Here’s FoxNews’ Greta Van Sustren discussing ACORN protestors being bused to a Pennsylvania town hall with Griff Jenkins.

"What happened in the case of this town hall that we saw there, only 200 people were let in and over 1,000 showed up. So 80 percent did not get in." (FOX News)

The New York Times just recently featured an Op-Ed by Blogger Ryan Sager warning people to, quote, ‘Stay off the Astroturf’.  But, in Sager’s opinion, Astroturfing is as American as, well, American cheese.

“American history is littered with movements that have organized aggressively to exaggerate their sway…While one might resist drawing a moral equivalence between our founding fathers and today’s self-proclaimed tea partiers, the principle is the same: outraged citizens married to savvy organizers.”

Asking where does organizing end and astroturfing begin, a Financial Times article responds to the release of a memo from a lobbying firm offering support and money to anyone wanting to protest carbon emissions taxation.

“The measure of success for these events will be the diversity of the participants expressing the same message as well as turnouts of several hundred attendees.”

But, as the Galllup poll indicated, many Americans believe the protests to be genuine and spontaneous.  And, to boot, some are concerned about the power of Obama’s bully pulpit in the internet age, likening the ubiquitous White House emails countering what it call ‘disinformation’ about Heath Care and Carbon emissions to internet pornography.

Newsy’s research indicates that Astroturfing and Obama-porn aren’t the only additions to the popular lexicon that have come out of the debate over health care and carbon taxation.  Seminar calling is another strategy, one aimed usually at conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

In 2003, Free Republic identified the characteristics of a Seminar Caller.

“They are easy to spot with their all American apple pie user names and their universal claims that they "are more conservative then you" or are "true conservatives". Problem is that they universally spout the far left line with a falsetto conservative spin…"

Rush is known for popularizing the term by dismissing certain callers as ‘seminar callers’.

Rush’s light touch stands in marked contrast to Glenn Beck’s response when confronted by an ostensibly liberal caller on his show.

Taking a step back from the fray, the blog News Hounds wonders whether even the labels hosts use to separate the wheat from the chaff in callers is losing meaning.

‘Seminar callers’ – is that a new term for ‘listeners?’ I suppose now anyone who disagrees with Beck is, first, subject to being deafened for life, and second, thrown into the category of a ‘seminar caller.’

So, do labels like astroturfing or seminar callers help make sense of the debate over health care or carbon taxation?  Or are they just excuses for the two sides to talk over one another?