Having just said in the post immediately below (“Liberal Inanities“) that commenting on every liberal inanity in the press and elsewhere would be an endless task that I generally choose to avoid, here I go again.
Liberal Boston Globe columnist Joan Venochi has some argument-against-interest fun poking holes in the arrogant pretension of Jonathan Gruber and Benjamin Edelman, the Harvard professor who made a virtual federal case out of a $4 dispute over his bill at a small family-owned Chinese restaurant. “If people like Gruber and Edelman think they are smarter than everyone else,” she concludes, “it’s because they are. Acting that way, however, has its consequences.”
Gruber’s remarks on the stupidity of the American people and the duplicitous framing of the Obamacare legislation, she writes, “caused a political firestorm as they fed into the narrative of Obamacare opponents that Americans were duped into health care legislation.”
Almost invariably these days, when political commentators (of whatever persuasion) use the term “narrative” in discussing the views of their opponents they don’t mean simply “a spoken or written account of connected events.” As Venochi seems to here, they mean something closer to an ideological, partisan, or biased interpretation that is fixed and hence impervious to contradictory facts. Venochi’s own “narrative” of the Obamacare opponents’ “narrative,” however, is not convincing.
I could be wrong (it has happened before), but I don’t believe most Obamacare opponents believe that “Americans were duped into health care legislation.” Aside from the important fact that Obamacare is much narrower than “health care legislation,” most Americans opposed Obamacare before it was passed and have continued to oppose it after it was passed. “Americans,” moreover, didn’t pass it. Democrats in Congress, and only Democrats, did. Were they “duped”?
That, I supposed, depends on what the definition of “dupe” is. Certainly any of the Democrats who believed the president’s repeated lies that “if you like you doctor … if you like your health plan …” were duped, but it is equally if not more likely that those Democrats were dupers, not dupes.
In short, it is a fact, not a “narrative,” to say that the president and his party attempted to dupe the American people by making false promises about the nature of Obamacare, but it is definitely not a “narrative of Obamacare opponents that Americans were duped into health care legislation.” The only dupes were any Democrats in Congress who believed the false promises.
