Thin line between grass and astroturf

The conservative blogger, Ryan Sager, makes an interesting point in today’s New York Times. Why is it we call what has been happening at the town hall meetings on healthcare “astroturf,” but not what the Obama administration – or Move On — has been doing?

“Astroturf” — essentially, manufactured public opinion, generally created using the deep pockets of corporations, designed to convince legislators and regulators that the public is behind a particular agenda.

Sourcewatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, distinguishes what it calls “genunine grassroots activism” from “astroturfing” this way:

Unlike genuine grassroots activism which tends to be money-poor but people-rich, astroturf campaigns are typically people-poor but cash-rich. Funded heavily by corporate largesse, they use sophisticated computer databases, telephone banks and hired organizers to rope less-informed activists into sending letters to their elected officials or engaging in other actions that create the appearance of grassroots support for their client’s cause.

The question is whether it is fair to describe opposition to the Obama health plan and the public option as “astrotruf.” The answer depends, I think, on your partisan beliefs — sort of like asking whether the chicken or the egg came first.

There always has been a significant portion of the public — even before the interference of the corporate interests — that were suspicious of Barack Obama on health care, even if skeptics had been a minority. The money and strategizing coming from the right, in particular the money coming in from the insurance lobby, has only increased the skepticism.

Does that mean that the current opponents, the ones shouting most loudly at the healthcare forums, represent a fake movement? I don’t think so.

Consider this from William Greider’s 1992 book, Who Will Tell the People, which outlined how various intersecting strands — campaign contributions, voter apathy, and what he called “democracy for hire” — were leaving our democracy weakened and ineffective.

“Democracy for hire” is similar to “astroturfing,” but encompasses a much greater phenomenon: not just the creation of fictional grassroots support, but manufactured facts and analysis. But it operates in the same way, by manipulating the debate.

Grieder describes a targeted, PR-industry-run campaign in 1990 designed to kill clean-air legislation. The PR firm, Bonner & Associates (yes, the same firm tied to the forged NAACP letters), “persuaded” an array of otherwise apolitical civic organizations in auto-industry states “to take a stand” against tougher fuel standards by convincing the group’s leaders that higher mileage requirements “would make it impossible to manufacture any vehicles larger than a Ford Escort or a Honda Civic.” (Greider, p. 37)

Greider writes that Bonner was paid “somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million” (in 1990) for “scouring six states for potential grassroots voices, coaching them on the ‘facts’ of the issue, paying for the phone calls and plane fares to Washington and hiring the hall for a joint press conference.” (Greider, p. 37)

The groups lend a different look to the argument, putting a human face on what otherwise is a corporate campaign.

Bonner told Greider (pp. 37-38) that

“It’s farm groups worrying about small trucks. It’s people who need station wagons to drive kids to Little-League games. These are the groups with political juice and they’re white hot.”

Greider, however, does view this as truly democratic. (p. 38)

In actuality, earnest citizens are being skillfully manipulated by powerful interests — using “facts” that are debatable at best — in a context designed to serve narrow corporate lobbying strategies, not free debate.

The problem with using this concept to describe the shouters at the town halls is that — even with the concerted corporate effort behind it — the shouters appear to have come before the corporate money and they also appear to be plugging into some real concerns about the Obama health plan (even if it based on some ugly lies and distortions).

The reality, I think, is that progressives have allowed themselves to be out-organized by the right at a time when progressives should have had the ear of the people in power.

Basically, what the right has done on health care is what the left should have been doing. More from Sager:

One reason the town hall protesters are called Astroturf is that they have ties to groups with corporate financing like FreedomWorks, run by Dick Armey the former House majority leader. But the Obama administration has been doing its own stage managing. At a town hall in Virginia last month, the president took questions from members of organizations with close ties to the administration, including the Service Employees International Union and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. The Web site of another liberal group, Health Care for America Now, instructs counter-protesters to “bring enough people to drown” out the Tea Partiers.

What’s the difference?

Not much, really. Sager:

Organizing isn’t cheating. Doing everything in your power to get your people to show up is basic politics. If they believe what they’re saying, no matter who helped organize them, they’re citizens and activists.

The left — or a portion of it, anyway — allowed Obama too long of a honeymoon period, which left a political vacuum. Obama and Congress have seen little pressure from his left, and much from his right, creating an imbalance that plays into the outmoded political narrative that the newsmedia has had difficulty moving beyond.

The reality is that the Democrats have spent the better part of the last six months backpedaling on healthcare reform, trying to appease Republicans and conservatives with a weak and likely ineffectual plan that the GOP is not going to support anyway. That’s a sucker’s bet.

If Democrats were serious about reform, they’d follow the example of U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and be bold and unapologetic in their support for a competing public insurance plan, even if they refuse to go all the way to single-payer.