Thoughts On The Presidential Address
I have to give President Obama credit. He is a phenomenal public speaker and orator. His ability to inject emotion and passion in his words is uncanny
The examples and rhetoric he uses make it very hard for anyone to disconnect with. He tells stories that force you to agree with in fear of being labeled heartless and uncaring towards suffering people
Obama’s ability to market his ideas and message has rarely been seen before in a President. All marketeers should take lesson in how Obama orchestrated his path to the white house. It was pure marketing and persuasive genius.
These skillful tactics that Obama employs make it easy for people to rally emotion behind. Unfortunately, Obama’s messages seem to be more fantasy than truth. More idealistic than feasible. It seems that more and more people are beginning to discover that there may not be much substance behind his powerful rhetoric, as seen in his tanking public opinion poll numbers.
His promises and plans all seem great when he talks of them. Not once did he explain how his plans will actually work. He only stated his intended outcomes; not the necessary leg work, sacrifices, and risks involved.
Proper health care reform is critical for this country. Unfortunately reform can either take us in two directions. Either to a more efficient and effective method to support our citizens; or towards a more bloated, debt-ridden, corrupt system that burdens our future.
I personally do not know the answer or plan to solve this country’s health care crisis. However, I do recognize that people must learn to pull the wool off their eyes and examine the facts and concrete plans that lie underneath the rhetoric.
I found the GOP response by Rep. Boustany quite interesting and I encourage you to check it out. You can find the video here.
Here is another essay on the Obama’s address last night that examines the promises he made in more detail.
Well said Matt, pretty words are just that…pretty words. It seems like the more I find out about the public option the less I like it. I think we need to either have the public option or reform the practices of insurance companies and not both. It’s confusing stuff. I need to read more about this to have a better understanding. Do you know of any good independent websites that can shed some light on this?
@Joel
Lately I’ve been getting news from http://www.drudgereport.com and http://www.realclearpolitics.com
Although, I do believe those two news collectors have a right slant to them.
Here are some other interesting links. Try getting some of your fact checking from Politifact and from Factcheck.org. Instead of just listening to, and blindly following Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, everyone should do some fact checking of their own. These sites do a great job fact checking both sides – for better or worse.
http://mediamattersaction.org/factcheck/200909090008
http://www.dailykingfish.com/diary/1363/la07-lord-boustany-to-give-republican-response-tonight
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/twenty-six-lies-about-hr-3200/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
I find that citing Obama’s ability to state factually how the insurance business has screw over people as “marketing” is absolutely disgusting. I do not believe that injecting compassion for dying people is fear. This is the real world that we live in. These things really do happen. He’s not scaring us into supporting a war in order to keep terrorists out of our country. THAT is fear.
I work at a state funded hospital so I feel I have the right to say a few things. If preventative care were more easily accessible, we’d be healthier and we’d need much less invasive surgeries. My day to day job revolves around helping people who are critically and terminally ill. A service that I think everyone should be forced to perform at some time to maintain, or in many cases, obtain a grasp on humanity. I can’t begin to imagine being in the shoes of so many patients or the shoes of the family members who will incur their debt when they pass. Hospitalization is terribly expensive. What happens when they max out their coverage? We as American’s are so focused on “me” that we can’t even see that there are others to consider. I don’t understand how anyone can argue with how providing more options to all American’s is a bad idea. I would think that the “socialist” opposed people would welcome the competition to free the insurance industry of the monopolizing agencies. Isn’t that how car insurance works? Wouldn’t you like to save more money by switching to Geico or Progressive? How is this really any different????????? The money reform will cost will come from the system itself. I can see how someone who doesn’t understand the health care industry may not get this but there really is that much excessive spending. Great example. Medicare is requiring more strict oversight for their claims because of excessive spending they incur tracking paperwork. If any of the paperwork is not right, the claim could actually be denied by Medicare to the hospital and the hospital would then have to eat the cost. Medicare is trying to make the hospitals responsible for their paper trails. I know this to be true. We had meetings about it at work. We are required to be more cautious and ensure that our paper trail is essentially error free. My colleagues and I are being held accountable for ensuring we are performing our jobs right.
The big thing that no one wants to believe is that we who are insured are already paying for those who are not. When someone walks into the ER and is uninsured….. well who do you suppose is paying for that? And let me state that that is the usual way that they present themselves. The show up in the ER. The place that costs me $100 just to walk into the door and sign in. The most expensive place to get that raid strep test performed. The uninsured have no primary care. Their visit becomes a locally and federally funded affair. You don’t think the hospitals have enough money to cover the expenses, do you? I have one of the best policies around because I work for the state. And yet an ER visit with 1 X-Ray, a breathing treatment and 2 prescriptions for a case of walking pneumonia cost me almost $500 out of pocket. It was absolutely ridiculous to pay so much for so little. How much would that have cost me if I had no insurance? What if my probable misdiagnosis of asthma 10 years ago was uncovered by BCBS? Would that have interfered with my claim?
Obama said he wants to fix what is broken. Covering preventative care, taking away the caps on coverage, eliminating the ability to be denied due to preexisting conditions and giving people the ability to have insurance companies compete for their business all sounds like a good plan to me. Boustany said that if we were to make America’s change their healthcare it would be too costly. He was correct that it would cost too much but he twisted the statement to look as though Obama wants to start from scratch. I find this to be very typical Republican tactic. Did you know that Boustany has been sued for malpractice 3 times, is a birther, and actually tried to buy the British title of “Lord”? A former heart surgeon who has made a large percent of his fortune off of angioplasty and bypass procedures needed for those who either didn’t care enough about or realize the backlash of the junk they put into their bodies. Can you imagine how much less business he’d had if preventative care and routine checkups had been more affordable and accessible to so many of his patients?
At this time, I found the structure of Obama’s plan to be quite simple. He didn’t give a business analysis and provide pie charts or graphs, but he stated what he wanted to do and how he planned to pay for it. What more could you expect at this time? Also, it was an address. Of course he didn’t get down to the nitty gritty details. When has any leader of anything gone into excessive details when initially pitching an idea? This was the first step. Let’s be realistic.
Here are some other interesting links. Try getting some of your fact checking from Politifact and from Factcheck.org. Everyone should do some fact checking of their own. These sites do a great job fact checking both sides – for better or worse.
http://mediamattersaction.org/factcheck/200909090008
http://www.dailykingfish.com/diary/1363/la07-lord-boustany-to-give-republican-response-tonight
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/twenty-six-lies-about-hr-3200/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
@Greta
You bring up some great points. There is no doubt that your first-hand experience gives you great insight in to the crisis we are facing.
Concerning Obama’s use of compassion in his oration, it comes off to me as a tactic to polarize people views. He is essentially trying to create a situation where if you disagree with his message you are also showing lack of compassion to these victims of insurance profit maximization.
My thoughts on Obama’s adress last night mainly focus on his false promises and idealism to sell his plan…
Quoting “The Unhealthy Politics of Deja Vu” by David Gratzer (http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/10/obama-healthcare-speech-opinions-david-gratzer.html)
“Last night, the President said his reforms would fight rising costs, not add to the deficit, and reduce government waste. Countless observers have already shown that the President is wrong, among them the Congressional Budget Office, which calculates that the plan will increase costs and explode the deficit. And, as I observed in the Washington Examiner, government waste will grow under ObamaCare, since the House bill creates a sea of new Washington-based programs, offices, and bureaucracies (53, by one count) to micro-manage your health insurance, your hospital, and even your family doctor.”
I agree reform is needed, and the best way to do that is through bi-partisan cooperation. It seems Obama is trying to sell a one sided plan through exaggerated promises.
@Jared
Hey Jared. Just a heads up why your comment didn’t post immediately, I have a spam blocking setting on that prevents large amounts of links from being posted.
I dont want you think I was trying to censor!
@Jared
I scanned several of those links. There is so much contradictory accusations and half-facts from both sides it makes my head spin.
In my future political rambles, I’ll make efforts to bring arguments from both sides of the spectrum.
Thanks for the info!
Your response to his “tactic” is exactly how Republicans responded to those who wanted to bring the troops home. “If you don’t support the troops your not a patriot!” I feel that Obama is forcing people to see that insurance companies are capably of being responsible for the deaths of citizens. So what if it makes you feel compassion? You’d be heartless if you didn’t feel anything. Who deserves to be treated like that? Especially when we have the ability to change those outcomes.
David Gratzer was a campaign adviser for Rudy Giuliani. Factcheck.org states that, “He is a Canadian psychiatrist who writes chiefly opinion pieces for conservative U.S. publications that are critical of Canadian-style health care systems”. I hardly think that he’s a reliable nonpartisan source. Factcheck.org and politico.com are much better. I also don’t know how Obama’s plan can be considered a “false promise”. How do you know it’s false? You can’t see into the future and the only way of anything being false would first require the implementation of the reform.
Also, Obama has strayed from his original desires for reform to include ideas of others. He’s willing to compromise. He has incorporated ideas from Hilary Clinton and John McCain. The reason that there aren’t many Republican ideas is very simple to understand. They don’t have many plans. They’d rather rally people together with their “birther” claims and build hate than do something productive and for the greater good of the people.
@Greta
There is no reason to bring up and compare the GOP’s ranting from the past. I am not defending the Republican Party. I am only calling attention to Obama’s use of rhetoric to polarize public emotion and create a “sucker’s choice” in the public’s mind. This is falsely creating two choices; one where you can be a heartless and evil and disagree with his ideas or go along with his plan and be righteous. In reality there are more options that need to be examined.
All politicians do it. If it was a GOP President doing the same thing, I would be writing the same article about them.
You are practically employing Obama’s said tactic when you call someone heartless for not feeling anything and not using our ability to fix the problem. There’s a difference between sympathizing with someone’s problems and agreeing to rush a plan that could potentially crush our already overburdened economy.
Anyone can recall and use just about any political figure’s past in attempt to discredit what their message is.
I call it a false promise in that he claims one thing to garner attention, momentum and support; when the plan that he is proposing has other implications and details that either haven’t been figured out yet or are not 100% accurate.
Check out this article, http://reason.com/news/show/135976.html, it reviews of some of Obama’s misconceptions.
The purpose of my blog post is to build awareness that you shouldn’t fall in love with pretty rhetoric and accept ideal promises as fact. It was not meant as a Republican sounding board or Democratic mud sling. Please don’t assume either.
With all that being said, I do appreciate your opinions. I encourage you to express your ideas and beliefs as much as you can and want here.
Greta, you are hilarious. You come on this blog written by a non-partisan writer and start spouting off about Republican scare tactics. You sound like you must be reading straight off the Huffington Post/Daily Kos talking points.
I also get a huge kick out of how you try to persuade people to go to non partisan sources like factcheck.org and politico.com. There is one true nonpartisan source here that should be considered, the Congressional Budget Office. You remember them right? They’re the ones who reminded the President that there is no way we can afford the current bills that have been proposed and that his promise that no new debt will be created would be broken from day one.
So you go from attacking Republican tactics to crying out for nonpartison approach to spouting completely partisan attacks about “birthers”. Why don’t you get it together and make up your mind. Senator Burr was at CMC in Charlotte last week talking about a Healthcare Reform plan that he sponsored. Others have presented their plans. Just because Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to have them heard doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/09/10/joe-wilson-s-dirty-health-care-secret.aspx
http://reason.com/news/show/136032.html
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