Stunned by critics, Obama adjusts health-care message

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday launched a new Web site to fight questionable but potentially damaging charges that President Obama's proposed health-care overhaul inevitably would lead to "socialized medicine," "rationed care" and even forced euthanasia for the elderly.

But in introducing the Web site, White House officials tacitly were acknowledging a difficult reality: They suddenly are at risk of losing control of the public debate over a signature issue for Obama and now are playing defense in a way they have not since last year's campaign.

At a summit of North American leaders in Mexico, Obama sounded an optimistic note, predicting "the American people are going to be glad that we acted to change an unsustainable system so that more people have coverage."

But aides said the rapidly escalating threat to Obama's health-care plans had led him to order them to formulate a crisper message.

And Democratic Party officials enlisted in the fight by the White House acknowledged in interviews that the growing intensity of opposition to the president's health-care plans — within the past week likened on talk radio to something out of Hitler's Germany, lampooned by protesters at congressional town-hall meetings and vilified in television commercials — had caught them off guard and forced them to begin an August counteroffensive.

In the process, the administration has had a harder time promoting themes it wanted to strike in this period: that the current system is unsustainable and that Obama's plan holds concrete benefits for people who have health insurance as well as for those who do not.

"We all had a good sense that some of this was going to take place," said Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee. "To be fair, I think we were probably a little surprised — just a little — at the use of swastikas and the comparisons to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich that even Rush Limbaugh has fanned the flames on. And we were a little surprised at the mob mentality." (The phrase "mob mentality" is itself part of the Democratic effort to paint opponents of a health-care overhaul as part of an unruly but organized effort.)

For some of Obama's supporters, the newly galvanized opposition to his proposed policies provided a troubling flashback to the successful effort to stop President Clinton's similarly ambitious plans 16 years ago — a fight Obama's aides had studied carefully to avoid the same fatal mistakes.

White House officials say such fears are unwarranted, arguing that the conservative protests are given outsize coverage on cable news. "Don't associate loud with effective," White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in an interview, adding that he detected no anxiety from supportive lawmakers in politically vulnerable districts. "What is coming across is a lot of noise and a lot of heat without a lot of light."

White House officials say their August counteroffensive is, in itself, a break from the Clinton approach, now viewed as having failed to adequately address critics.

Obama will take the lead this week in a series of public meetings to counter the opposition — events that White House officials hope will offer a high-profile opportunity to confront and rebut critics.

As part of the effort, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland wrote an opinion article in USA Today on Monday calling conservative protests at congressional town-hall meetings "un-American" for "drowning out opposing views." (That prompted a swift rebuke from House Minority Leader John Boehner, among other Republicans.)

New television commercials disputing the conservative attacks are in the works, Woodhouse said, and allied members of Congress have been sent home for the August break with a set of poll-tested talking points aimed at shifting the focus to the administration's advertised benefits of the plan.

"There's a whole set of rumors that the old playbook would tell you not to do anything about because you draw attention," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director. "The lesson we've learned is you ignore these rumors at your peril, and the right answer is to take them head on in as big a way as possible."

Only weeks ago, Obama was pressing the House and the Senate to complete work on their health legislation before the summer recess, a goal derailed by divisions among Democrats as well as between the two parties.

Some supporters now wonder whether Obama's earlier glide path on high-risk initiatives such as the economic-stimulus package and bailouts of banks and auto companies left him unprepared for the recent surge of conservative opposition.

"The expectation was that things have gotten so bad in the last 16 years that there would be consensus on the need to act this time," said Howard Paster, Clinton's chief lobbyist in 1993. "That was a mistake, that assumption."

Obama's team won early, high marks for diverging from the Clinton approach, specifically by emphasizing the need to control costs and improve coverage for those already insured instead of making the same moral-duty argument about the need to cover the uninsured.

Yet, once Congress started filling in the details and its analysts priced the House and Senate bills, cost estimates caused sticker shock.

And that again drew taxpayers' attention to the main reason for those costs: covering the uninsured, through more Medicaid spending and subsidies for people to buy insurance and small businesses to provide it.

That helped conservatives speak to a constituency that has gained significant anti-Obama attention this year, the fiscally hawkish "tea party" activists. They have dismissed Obama's promises that his plan will be fully paid for through offsetting spending cuts or increased taxes, and have cast the plan as a costly takeover of health care by the government.

"I think the combination of spending a trillion dollars that we don't have, and another rushed process, really triggered this," said Matt Kibbe, president of the conservative group FreedomWorks. "People started paying attention."