Selling Obamacare
8th July 2014
The amount of taxpayer money involved is unprecedented. “Obamacare seems due to join Social Security and Medicare in one respect: as a public policy advertising phenom, a program that is reviled and perhaps eventually revered in political advertising for billions of dollars in ad spending to come,” Elizabeth Wilner, vice president for strategic initiatives at Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), wrote in a press release last year.
Such government P.R. campaigns have become a regrettable staple of American politics, since the default attitude among those in power is that propaganda is only bad when the other guy does it. When the Bush administration got caught violating a statutory ban on “covert propaganda” by passing off fake news reports to local TV stations and paying a columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the “No Child Left Behind” law, Democrats were justly outraged. And yet, these days Democrats are untroubled that their own campaign to sell Obamacare is taking government propaganda to new heights-and depths.