"Freedom" Isn't Free

I have been pushing the issue most of the summer that Democrats and the left should adopt some of the right's vocabulary tricks to help sell health care reform. In particular in selling the public option I felt like the best way to sell it would be to tell the American people that creating a public option gives them the "freedom" to choose between private insurance or public sector insurance. Its a small thing honestly but effective messaging is often about little things. And the word freedom just resonates with most of America. Alas no one on the left really altered their messaging to incorporate more words like "freedom" which the right wingers have been using for years to push their agenda.

Well evidently I am not the only one frustrated by this lack of aggressiveness and foresight by the Democrats. In today's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank calls Democrats and the left out for ceding the word "freedom" to the right wingers in the first place.

There are few things in politics more annoying than the right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word "freedom" that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

Equally annoying is the silence of Democratic Party leaders on the subject. They spend their careers hearing this fatuous argument from the other side, but challenging conservatism's claim to freedom seems to be beyond their powers. Or beneath their dignity. Or something.

Today they're paying for that high-mindedness. While Democrats fussed with the details of health-care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself.

Any increase in the size or duties of government, the right tells us, necessarily subtracts from our freedom. Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health-care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.

"What we're going to end up with is higher taxes, bigger government and less freedom for the American people," House Republican Leader John Boehner said on Fox News in July. "We're going to have a real fight for how much freedom we're going to have left in America."

People working the freedom vein were numerous at the large protest that took place in Washington on Saturday. Sponsors included the Institute for Liberty, Let Freedom Ring, Young Americans for Liberty, the Campaign for Liberty, the Center for Individual Freedom, and BureauCrash a.k.a. "the Freedom Activist Network." FreedomWorks, the grass-roots pressure group, prepared a video for the occasion which encouraged people to believe that the administration's many policy "czars" revealed its kinship to the Russian autocracy of old.

That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: "Freedom from Want," an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to "secure to every nation," as Roosevelt put it, "a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I know we are late in the game here but there still is plenty of time for the left to make some slight adjustment on messaging for health care. I can promise you that if we keep associating the public option over and over with the "freedom to choose" people will start to see it in a different light. Its just a matter of actually going out and doing it, now who is coming with me?

77% Support "Choice" Of A Public Option

New polling data shows once again if you ask the polling question properly, they overwhelming majority of Americans support a public option in health care reform.

A new study by SurveyUSA puts support for a public option at a robust 77 percent, one percentage point higher than where it stood in June.

But the numbers tell another story, as well.

Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word "choice" from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of "creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies."

Opponents of the president's agenda jumped on the findings as evidence that backing for the public option was dropping. Proponents responded by arguing that NBC's tinkering with the language of the question (which it had also done in its July survey) had contributed to the drop in favorability for a public plan.

SurveyUSA's poll, which was commissioned by the progressive group MoveOn.org, a proponent of the public plan, gives credence to those critiques. While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist --"choice" is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports -- it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.

In asking its question SurveyUSA used the same exact words that NBC/Wall Street Journal had used when conducting its June 2009 survey. That one that found 76 percent approval for the public option: "In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance--extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?"

Now think about something for a moment. If the wording of a question when polling the popularity of a public option can make a major difference then it stands to reason that the wording from people advocating for a public option will also make a huge difference on how it will be received. That is why for months now I have been saying that President Obama and other prominenet Democrats in Congress should be using the word "freedom" in association with the public option. I have no doubt in my mind that if our Democratic leaders started saying that providing a public option gives people

"the freedom to choose"

what kind of insurance they want that they would see a major bump in their approval ratings. While it is on some levels cynical to rely heavily on messaging tricks, the truth is it actually does work. The word "freedom" appeals to most Americans on a visceral level and just makes them more open to which ever proposal is offering them more of it.

Its still not too late to start injecting this into the messaging during the fight for health care reform I just don't know if they will ever do it. For the life Of me I can't understand why nobody on our side has seen this before. Everything Republicans talk about damn near begins and ends with the word freedom. This is an easy but effective way to turn that right back on them. At the very lease somebody could do it as a trial balloon to see the results. If anybody knows somebody that knows somebody that works for somebody, please pass this along.