"Astroturfing" Jennifer Rubin - 10.16.2009 - 10:41 AM
"That is what they call a phony grassroots campaign cooked up by special interests or political parties afraid to show their own faces. That’s what liberals claimed the tea parties and then the town-hall events were. Fake. The attendees were flunkies. It turns out that liberals were projecting. Politico tells us:
"At a meeting last April with corporate lobbyists, aides to President Barack Obama and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) helped set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed by industry groups, that has played a key role in bolstering public support for health care reform. . . .
"The Democratic officials made no overt demands. Rather, they brought together the players and laid the groundwork for the creation of the coalition, and that was followed by more-direct solicitations from an outside Democratic consultant, Nick Baldick, retained by Healthy Economy Now, asking attendees at the meeting to join the coalition and contribute to its ad campaigns.
They concocted two groups — Americans for Stable Quality Care and its predecessor, Healthy Economy Now (I think the term is “front organization”) — to push the White House’s health-care agenda.
"That’s as good an example of astroturfing as you’re going to find. There’s nothing illegal about it (unless campaign-finance laws were broken, for which we have seen no evidence), but it’s fundamentally dishonest. The White House orchestrated support, played to the support, and crowed about the support, used the front groups to fund advertising, and then used all that to convince real voters there was a groundswell of “support” for its proposals. Not surprisingly, an ethics expert interviewed by Politico (we need experts because ethics is a subspecialty, knowledge of which is not commonly found among ordinary politicians) thinks the whole thing raises “questions.” Yeah.
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