Not Many Green Shoots in the Obamacare Astroturf

posted at 8:36 am on June 10, 2009 by Karl

Byron York seems somewhat impressed by Pres. Obama’s astroturf campaign for a government takeover of the US healthcare system:

About 20 people from Northern Virginia have come to this faux-rustic French café on a Saturday morning to discuss health care reform. That alone makes them unusual; after all, there are a lot of other things one could be doing to begin the weekend. But they have answered the call from Organizing for America (OFA), which is basically the 2008 Obama campaign operating under a new name.

“This is the political issue I care about most, apart from the war,” declares one woman, who says she was born and raised in Canada and favors a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system for the U.S.

“It’s a moral issue,” says another woman, who identifies herself as a nurse.

“It’s criminal,” says a woman who is from France and envisions a European-style, single-payer system for this country.

This meeting, and others like it — OFA says there were thousands all across the country — is the beginning of the hand-to-hand phase of the health care reform fight. After months of buildup, the White House is planning an all-out campaign to pass its reform package, whatever that turns out to be.

However, York’s description of the actual meeting — and the effort — ends up sounding less than impressive, for several reasons.

OFA’s claim that “tens of thousands” would be attending these meetings is a completely unverified estimate. Even taking that claim at face value, the number of attendees would be a tiny fraction of the 10+ million names in the OFA database. It would also be a fraction of the number of people who attended the Tax Day Tea Party protests, which lacked the ostensible organizational muscle of OFA.

Reviewing the onsite reports from sources as varied — but mostly left-leaning — as Reuters, The Field, Falling Panda, Daily Kos, and Inside Chron, a couple of common points emerge.

First, the attendees skewed heavily toward seniors. The young are more likely to be healthy and uninsured; the online social network that seemed so impressive during the 2008 campaign seems to have been a bust in motivating young supporters for Obamacare. (Further indirect evidence of this is the roughly 100,000 views for Obama’s YouTube healthcare address, as compared to the over 500,000 views for Obama’s budget message.) The middle-aged do not seem to be much more represented. Public opinion polls show that people think healthcare is an important issue. However, the limited turnout here suggests a lack of intensity, even among Obama supporters.

Second, a substantial portion (perhaps a majority) of those who did attend were advocates for a Canadian-style, single-payer system. They may be the only people in America who have not figured out that a single-payer plan is not even on the table in Congress. It is difficult to see these people maintaining enthusiasm for whatever product emerges from the sausage-making in the various committees charged with grinding out the bills.

Indeed, the best this small band of socialistic seniors can hope for is a strong, government-controlled insurance plan to crowd out private insurers — an option losing support with centrist Democrats in the House and Senate. If OFA hopes to have any impact at all on the healthcare debate, it will need to produce more than a few grey shoots.

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