WITH the “public option” part of President Obama’s health care reform plan looking dead in the water, many of its supporters are taking issue with the legitimacy of its opposition. “We call it ‘Astroturf,’ ” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said of the protesters at town-hall meetings. “It’s not really a grass-roots movement.”
What exactly is Astroturf supposed to mean? Typically, that, in the absence of widespread support for a position, some unseen entity manufactures the appearance of it. But is that really what’s happening here?
With voters split fairly evenly down the middle on health care reform, it seems presumptuous to label your side “real” and the other synthetic. Considering today’s 24-hour cable news babbling, down-and-dirty blog activism, and talk-radio rabble-rousing, it’s worth asking if the Astroturf epithet still has meaning.
Astroturf, in the political sense, is thought to have been coined by Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who used it to describe the “mountain of cards and letters” he got promoting what he saw as the interests of insurance companies. “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and Astroturf,” Bentsen said in 1985, “this is generated mail.”
Generated mail is a pretty old idea. In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Brutus is persuaded to assassinate Caesar in part by letters of support from the public — letters that were actually faked by Cassius “in several hands … as if they came from several citizens.”
More recently, a Washington lobbying firm working for the coal industry was caught sending bogus letters to members of Congress — supposedly from community organizations — urging them to oppose the House cap-and-trade bill. Such brazen fraud is rare, though, and politicians are usually pretty savvy about seeing through it. More effective are campaigns aimed at generating news coverage to convince people that many other people hold a certain position. This is what Republicans are now accused of doing. What’s unclear is how this differs from old-fashioned political organizing.
American history is littered with movements that have organized aggressively to exaggerate their sway. Samuel Adams was a master manipulator of the town hall, rallying opponents of British policy to show up at meetings and then publicizing the outcomes — communicated through the colonies’ Committees of Correspondence — to embolden patriots in other towns. While one might resist drawing a moral equivalence between our founding fathers and today’s self-proclaimed Tea Partiers, the principle is the same: outraged citizens married to savvy organizers.
One reason the town hall protesters are called Astroturf is that they have ties to groups with corporate financing like FreedomWorks, run by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader. But the Obama administration has been doing its own stage managing. At a town hall in Virginia last month, the president took questions from members of organizations with close ties to the administration, including the Service Employees International Union and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. The Web site of another liberal group, Health Care for America Now, instructs counter-protesters to “bring enough people to drown” out the Tea Partiers.
Is this Astroturf?
Here’s a rule: Organizing isn’t cheating. Doing everything in your power to get your people to show up is basic politics. If they believe what they’re saying, no matter who helped organize them, they’re citizens and activists. The language at the town halls may get ugly and rough. But it’s not Astroturf.
__________
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/opinion/19sager.html
