Harvey Ferdman’s testimony last week at Ed Martin’s “Obamacare hearing” was unique.

Other reform proponents talked about what the bill will accomplish or appealed to the human sympathies of the Tea Partiers in the room, citing the inhumane treatment they’ve gotten from health insurance companies. Ya-da, ya-da, I could hear the hardhearted ones thinking. In fact, one woman began her remarks this way:

One thing I’ve heard here tonight over and over by … these people is that millions–I know there’s thousands and millions dying all over the streets–[at that point she flapped a dismissive hand] I know we’ve heard that from the administration too.

So you see what I mean. When Judith Parker and LaDonna Appelbaum described their problems with health and life insurance quotes, when Bunnie Gronborg explained why the ACA is not socialism, that woman heard: Ya-da, ya-da. But we wanted a chance to speak about what would touch most people. We knew that the callous, ignorant folks who listen to the lies of Schlafly, et. al. would figuratively clap their hands over their ears, that hearing it wouldn’t  change them. We just didn’t want them holing up in their comfy echo chamber. We wanted to make them uneasy.

But Harvey took a different approach. He crafted a message based on their ideology. If anything, that upset them more than what they saw as sob stories from other proponents of reform. But Harvey delivered his speech in the most sweet spirited tone possible–which went some way toward quieting them.

Here’s the transcript, but you’d gain by watching it.

We’ve all experienced group plans. The things about a group plan is that when you change employers, they can’t refuse you for a pre-existing condition. Why is that? That’s because if only people who need insurance bought insurance, the insurance companies would be broke. Right? So the group plans, they’re spreading out that small predictable risk against that big hopefully not gonna happen risk. And that’s partially what’s happening with what you guys are calling Obamacare–I call it affectionately Obamacare. And that’s what they’re doing by requiring that everyone participates, so that the healthy and the sick all share that cost, so no … so the insurance companies can afford to stay in business. If we don’t require everyone to have health insurance, the insurance companies are going to go broke.

That’s my first point. My second point is, honestly I would much rather have an accountable government [derisive laughter], who I can elect every two or three years. You guys, you guys, [trying to be heard above the laughter] you guys are a good example. There’s been a lot of political footholds made by the Tea Party. I respect that. You guys are a good example. You can change the politics. You can change the politicians. But I cannot change the bureacrats and the profit-oriented people who run the insurance companies. If they make a decision [clapping from proponents of reform], if they make a decision about the end of life, about me, I can’t fire them. But I can get my politicians out of office and put someone in there who believes the way I do.

If you watched the video, you heard Harvey’s tone of voice and the audience’s cynical reaction. You saw the gray haired gentleman in the frame with Harvey shaking his head at all the critical points in the speech. They’re a concrete wall. They believe that business is never wrong, and that if you don’t get what you need in life, it’s because you weren’t disciplined enough.

What George Lakoff said on this point bears repeating:

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

It’s Calvinism. I was raised with it. Prosperity is a sign that God loves you and that you are one of the elect. Poor people are not favored by God. It’s some ugly stuff, especially when it starts influencing public policy, because it can cause, as the lady said, “millions–thousands and millions littering the streets”. Not literally of course. No, most of them die unobtrusively in their houses. How convenient for the Corpublicans.

I respect Harvey for a beautifully crafted argument and for his gentle tone. And although he made little progress against those cussedly bullheaded and hardhearted people, he could still give elected Democrats a lesson in how to present our point of view.

……………………………………….

Coverage of the Ed Martin event has been thorough on the Missouri progressive blogosphere. St. Louis Activist Hub, in fact, has three postings:

• I Don’t Care What You Say, It Was A Great Night For Health Reform
• Ed Martin Forgets His Supporters, Claims People “Know How To Be Civil”
• Ed Martin, Bill Hennessey Hide in the Back of Their Own Forum: Schlafly Bolts!

FiredUp! has one: This Is What a Better Informed and Better Organized Movement Looks Like.

Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice has a posting on its Facebook Page: Women’s Voices Members speak out at Health Care Forum

All that is in addition to my first piece, In which I explain who showed up for Ed Martin’s dance and my two videos–so far–of Schlafly: MS. Schlafly takes on “Obamacare” and But, but … I thought Republicans liked police states.

A letter in the Wednesday Post-Dispatch deserves comment.

For whom does Sen. Blunt work?

Shame on U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., for choosing to stand on the side of powerful corporations instead of working for the people who elected him (“Blunt blasts EPA for Ameren lawsuit,” Jan. 14).

Members of Congress have the moral responsibility to protect the health and safety of all Americans, and this includes keeping cancer-causing pollutants out of our air.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, despite attacks on it from people like Mr. Blunt, works to keep our air and water clean enough to sustain life. Scientists at the EPA know that in an average year a typical coal plant emits almost 4 million tons of carbon dioxide, not to mention doses of arsenic, mercury, lead and other heavy metals.

So when Ameren chooses its own wealth over our well being, our elected official should be outraged. Instead, the relationship between many of our elected representatives and corporate lobbyists has become almost incestuous.

We should ask Mr. Blunt if he works for us or for Ameren Missouri.

[italics mine]

Note that the letter writer has been listening to the advice dished out on this site by sarah jo, who summarized the Core Progressive Message, including this:

Progressives believe that the benefits of economic production should be shared by those who actually do the work and produce the wealth, not just by shareholders and top executives.

Progressives believe that the moral mission of government includes the protection and empowerment of citizens.  Protection includes education of all of its citizens,  defense against inhumane working conditions, medical care when needed,  access to safe food, air and water,  and a national defense and intelligence infrastructure commensurate with changing world conditions.

Sarah jo, a student of George Lakoff, recommends that whenever we criticize the right we should ALWAYS BEGIN BY STATING THE UNDERLYING MORALITY OF OUR POSITION. If you look at the italicized passages, you’ll see that the letter writer has done that. When it comes to effective communication with those who aren’t already in one’s own camp, Republicans have spent billions to give themselves a Ph.D. in mass psychology and linguistics. We’re in the second grade. But you get to skip a grade if you develop the presence of mind to always state the underlying morality of your position whenever you are presenting the lefty point of view. I’m going to do that–and bask in being a fourth grader.

Of course, most of the readers on this site implicitly understand that morality already, so I won’t be informing you of something you didn’t know. But, and here’s the thing, I suspect that we need to see this linguistic paradigm practiced. That’s the only way that the need for making our morality explicit to others will sink in. Otherwise, if you just read about it once, the admonition will strike you as “Yeah, yeah, she’s probably right.” And the idea will go no further.

This is an experiment. I don’t know whether I’ll find it too klunky to do it faithfully on this site. But I’ll try it, and I invite you to let me know how well you think it works–or doesn’t. (My sensibilities aren’t delicate. Speak up.)  

The more I read Lakoff, the more I realize that language really does matter.  Take for example Fran Townsend, outgoing Homeland Security Adviser, reiterating a previous statement of hers on MSNBC regarding the failure of the Administration to capture Bin Laden.  “It’s a success that hasn’t happened yet”. Right!   Townsend then goes on to comment on the Bush torture program as being relatively small with limited “eligibility for the program”.  How cool is that, linguistically speaking of course.   The word eligibility casts a desirable hue on the ugly image of torture.   Compare that with a local congressman’s comment regarding single payer health care that went something like this; “I support Single Payer but I don’t think it is feasible to do at this time”. Lakoff would identify that statement as a “surrendering in advance” statement. In all fairness to the solidly progressive congressman, I was gently reminded by ricklm that he had signed onto the Conyers bill, 636 Medicare for All. “So, while his heart is certainly in the right place, it seems that his lingo has just not caught up..  It is not easy, especially when you have to ad lib at a moment’s notice.

But the other side is very hard at work. After 35 years and $4 billion, they have assembled a system of dozens of think tanks and training institutes staffed by right wing intellectuals. They have dominated the world of issues framing and have changed American politics.  A new post showing  at the Mother Jones site reports on a focus group recently held in Virginia to test-market language to get tougher on Iran.  According to a focus group regular this is how it went:

On November 1, she went to the offices of Martin Focus Groups in Alexandria, Virginia, knowing she would be paid $150 for two hours of her time. After joining a half dozen other women in a conference room, she discovered that she had been called in for what seemed an unusual assignment: to help test-market language that could be used to sell military action against Iran to the American public. “The whole basis of the whole thing was, ‘we’re going to go into Iran and what do we have to do to get you guys to along with it?”

We live in a fast moving world of sound bites.  Lost in the cacophony is time for reason and reflection. Images from sound bites guide us. And the republican machine delivers up the sound bites that influence those images.    Consider the following; terror, terrorist, war, evil, evildoer, good guys, bad guys, mushroom cloud, bitch, (now tacitly approved by the McCain crowd to use against Hilary) bitchslap.   The images created by these bites arouse deeply embedded cultural attitudes, basic frames in each of us that represent our particular moral worldview.  More recently added to the repertoire are images evoked by the terms 9/11, jihad, and Islamic.   It is easy for the Republican machine to carry the day in framing the issues by building on the negative attitudes precipitated by the sound bite.  Democrats are left holding their hats and integrity in their hands.

Democrats would be wise to develop their own set of sound bites and avoid trying to operate off the Republican standard.  They only come off sounding defensive or inauthentic. Consider “cut and run” which is built on the images of war and evildoers.  It sold.  In a war it is cowardly to cut and run.  In attempts to counter this, John Murtha offered a slogan, “stay and pay” and Kerry came up with “lie and die”. According to Lakoff, the “pay” and “die” responses accept the war frame, but take the save-our-skins position, which in the war frame is considered cowardly and immoral. Needless to say, neither slogan flew. The progressive congressman’s “surrender in advance” comment exemplifies defensiveness.

Progressives missed the boat early on in allowing the occupation of Iraq to be termed a war.  Had it been appropriately termed an occupation, it would have greatly enhanced the progressive position for framing, just as it would have hampered the republican machine for mischief.  I have noticed a few stalwarts that have doggedly (and correctly) continued to refer to the Iraq mess as an occupation.  We have also fallen into the “illegal immigrant” trap.  Images created by this frame are felons, job usurpers, and social services stealers.  Lakoff recommends using the term “illegal employers” thus enabling us to reframe the debate based on demands for equitable wage and worker safety laws rather than pitting undocumented workers against American workers while overlooking a system that drives down all of their wages and endangers their health and welfare. Lesson number one is that we need to stop using the Republican playbook.

Progressives are well versed on historical facts and are able political analysts. We have a rich history of championing social and economic justice, and equality causes. We are not strangers to the struggle, witness the nurses on the line in Kentucky and West Virginia right now. But we do need to get a handle on our lexis and turn the tables on the Republican machine.  Otherwise they will keep us twisting in the wind as they pillage and plunder in the name of patriotism.

Central, these days, to the discussion on health care reform, is what George Lakoff refers to as the neoliberal position of thought. . Neither purely progressive nor purely conservative, this mode of thought shares progressive values and the ethics of care, insisting on maximizing health care coverage, and at the same time accepts a conservative version of market principles that guarantees profits to insurance companies.  An inherent tension between the two goals, the government to provide real quality health care and the profit-maximizing insurance marketplace, is thus created.

Of the Democratic presidential candidates, most favor the neoliberal position on health care reform. They believe that the market can be efficient and serve moral ends. They believe that markets can be effectively regulated to serve human interests and so, argue for technocratic changes to existing markets as a means to achieve progressive ends. They are unfazed by health care solutions that involve profit-maximizing private insurance companies.  They think they are on the move.  Republicans snidely refer to this jumble as “socialized medicine”.  But then, you know the republicans, anything, no matter how screwy, to get the fear factor in play.

The fly in the ointment is that profit-maximizing private insurance companies need to make  – profits!  Once upon a time, back in the day, it was all-good.  Profit maximizing insurance companies insured, for the most part, houses and lives.  Since not too many house burned down or blew away, they could take your premium dollars, invest them and maybe even turn a total profit on your account.  Same for life insurance because most of that insurance is term and is set to expire before you do.  Sweet!  But health insurance is another story.  Yuuk!  Everybody gets sick and weak and older.  Lots of benefits to be paid!  No profit in that!  And then they figured it out.  By excluding the tired, poor and sick and by denying claims to those who had purchased coverage, they could make a profit.  Health insurance became an industry that made money by not delivering the services it was paid to deliver. Yes!  And nothing is going to change no matter how much technocracy is employed.  Profit-maximizing industries are not going to stop doing what they do.  And with health care projected to become a 4 trillion dollar industry by 2012, wild horse won’t drag them away from that feeding frenzy. 
  So, good luck, Hillary, John and Barak in trying to regulate this baby into something that “serves moral ends”.

Lakoff cautions against the dangerous trap of “Surrender in Advance” thinking and states:

Those who pragmatically focus on appeasing what they assume will be unavoidable political opposition to their proposals also run the risk of moral surrender.  For instance, assuming strong, possibly insurmountable conservative resistance to government based health care solutions, they will embrace profit maximizing private insurance solutions because they believe that 1) political opposition can be muted and 2) the “free” market, properly regulated, can serve moral purposes. Proponents of these neoliberal solutions often overlook the fact that the very source of the health care crisis is the structure of the insurance: the less care they authorize, the more profit they make, and profits come first and are maximized.

Lakoff argues that the sanctioning of technocratic solutions for health care causes a failure of articulation of more progressive values.  Those values, health care for all, empathy and responsibility, protection and empowerment, go unstated. We are inundated with market management mechanisms that are next to impossible figure out.  We are so overwhelmed by complicated program principles that we are not even able to combat the Republican Propaganda Machine as it drearily drones out its mantra of “socialized medicine”.  Americans hear only the conservative moral view, and consequently, move toward that viewpoint. I am thinking of Pogo right now.

My dictum, in thinking of health care reform, is “all of the people, all of the time”.  A simple standard of measurement can be: “Does this improve the health care security of all of our fellow citizens in concrete ways?”  Progressive values for health care reform must be kept in the forefront of discussion to avoid being lost in the murky depths of technocratic improvisation.  I haven’t been hearing much of the progressive platform lately.  What I am hearing is that Americans will be able  (or compelled) to purchase “coverage”  (which means insurance) to the extent of their ability to pay, or perhaps they might be able to lobby (beg) for a subsidy or something (following extensive means testing of course), as represented in the ongoing saga of the SCHIP, but that they will have a choice over public or private insurance mechanisms.  Whatever the case, they will have some “coverage” depending upon their ability to pay. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Hillary, John, Barak, are you listening?

George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute believes that values are more important than issues in carrying elections. He also believes that this nation was pretty much founded on progressive values. He believes that the protagonists central to the development of our nation were citizens, then later perhaps, citizen revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Or maybe they were citizen abolitionists like Frederick Douglas or Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks. Or suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and naturalists like John Muir and Rachel Carson.  The list goes on.

  And then there was Franklin Roosevelt.  From Lakoff:

  …he permanently established government’s central role for using the common wealth for the common good by launching the New Deal.  It was more than a set of programs – it was a movement imbued with the core progressive values of empathy and responsibility, with the idea that government should not only care about people but also act on that caring.

Regrettably, the past several decades have seen the Republican right trampling all over these historical values and have offered up instead a stingy worldview based on authoritarian political values. Compounding the menace of the political authoritarianism was the increasing power of religious authoritarianism as defined by the Religious Right Movement. In almost lock step formation, these movements sought to denigrate progressive values and principles. 

With the help of a well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation, they trampled all over liberal members of Congress reducing them to practically forced apologies for crimes not committed.  The obligatory apology by Senator Durbin for his remark comparing the Abu Ghraib torture behaviors with Nazi behaviors during WWII comes to mind.  Ritual Defamation involves the tool of character assassination (and in the case of the contemporary right wing, relentlessly repetitive character assault) with the goal of censorship and repression.  For a comprehensive definition of Ritual Defamation, I have included this link.  I think we relabeled it Swiftboating in 04. I definitely recommend the read. [ http://www.lairdwilc… ]  The following from TomPaine.com:

The political cost to progressives, for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize.  It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged.  For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again.  It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large,

For some time it seemed as if the cacophony of right wing Talking Points Babble had completely obliterated the progressive voice of our nation, but then they had a running start.  Real organizing to this end began with NeoCons some thirty years ago, and if Lakoff is correct in his position that values are more important that issues, then the gift the NeoCons received in the form of Ronald Reagan was priceless.  Never let it be said that I admired Ron, but according to Lakoff, he communicated well and so connected with people.  They felt the (love) authenticity; they trusted him and came running.  Well that was his job history after all, getting into character and playing a role.  But it worked.  As for the issues, in the case of Ronald Reagan’s affair with the people, it became whatever he “communicated”.

Progressives have been at a disadvantage in this game. We always want to talk about the issues, but we have had difficulty in communicating a vision. We need to remember that it is about values as well.  It’s about how to articulate those values and not come off sounding defensive.  It’s about dumping the disconnect.  Watch Hillary.  What she says is measured and reasonable. But it is not authentic. Certainly she is not connecting with me.  When I watch Hillary, I see her wearing someone else’s values. There is definite dissonance.  On the other hand, it’s definitely a crush on Chris Dodd.  When he came out the other day unabashedly blocking the FISA travesty, he did so with all the authenticity of the original statesman.  There was no doubt what he was communicating – love of country.  He surely connected with me and I am sure countless others.  His numbers jumped. It’s a start and quite a treat, I might add.

So, the challenge for you, citizen commentators, is to take Dodd’s example and run with it.  Remind our guys in the big white houses that our basic values were and still are values of empathy and responsibility. Repeat those values ceaselessly and unabashedly.  Make their restoration the heart and soul of our vision for the future. Articulate, authenticate, communicate and connect!  Oh Yes, and give Chris Dodd three big cheers!

On the morning shows I heard someone mention that the Republican candidates for President were off speaking to the “Value Voters”.  By that I assumed they were off speaking to the Family Research Council. FRC values used to be referred to as “Family Values” which means stuff like heterosexual marriage, anti-choice positions and attending services on Sunday.  But now it is just “Value” as if the word value means all of these things, rather than meaning that heterosexual marriage, anti-choice positions and attending services on Sunday comprise a particular set of some values. Even the word “values” has morphed into the word “value”, which construes a more pointed and limited meaning. 

Properly defined, values are individual judgments of merit or worth of someone or something based on personal belief and opinion. And if this is the case, it seems that we should all be deemed “Value Voters”. because we are all constantly making judgments regarding all sorts of things. So then, why shouldn’t we be called “Value Voters” as well?  Well! We all know that it is because the Right has captured the market on provocative “feelings” language. And, as we all know that it was Ronald Reagan, who used this tool so effectively.  In fact, he used it so well that people didn’t care whether or not they shared his particular values, but because of his authenticity and, genuineness in communicating these values, they connected with him, they came to trust him, and the foothold gained by the right has been enormous. 

At the FRC, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee stole the show with an onsite straw poll showing him walking away with over 51% of the vote. Second placer Romney trailed with 10.40%.  CBN David Brody describes Huckabee’s speech as follows:

Finally, he came with a very straightforward purpose. He told the crowd that he’s one of them. He is a value voter. The crowd gave him standing ovation after standing ovation.

The speech was part policy, part tent revival. He was in full Pastor mode throwing out the Bible references left and right. The people I talked to afterwards were very impressed.

TheoCon values were the theme of his show-stealing diatribe:

“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

Huckabee also spoke adamantly of the need for conservative lawmakers to show no compromise on fighting for a constitutional amendment that defines marriage between a man and a woman. “I’m very tired of hearing people who are unwilling to change the constitution, but seem more than willing to change the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage,” he said.

Could it be that the TheoCons have found their man?

George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute believes that values are more important that issues in carrying elections. He claims that for too long Progressives have been ineffective in communicating their values, which include freedom, equality, human dignity and tolerance.  He and his team pick up the gauntlet and give us a framework in which to define progressive values and the methods to celebrate those values and make them work for us. In light of the frenzy  of the Republican candidates in wooing the FRC, I suspect that polls indicate we will be needing them.  I will be posting sections of Lakoff’s writings later this week.