PAUL ADAMS'S SPEECH TO CONGRESS

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Though still on holiday, I have heard a few of the reports carried by the Beeb on Obama's healthcare speech to both houses of Congress. When normal business resumes (in just over a week's time) I will pursue this sort of story (and many others) with gusto.

On Wednesday 9th September, I caught an interview with Michael Goldfarb of globalpost.com (a regular on Gavin Esler's Dateline: London) on Martha Kearney's The World At One. This Michael Goldfarb (not to be confused with others) was the topic's only voice on the programme, and he described the two-pronged opposition to Obama in interestingly different ways:

"It's contentious on the far-right". So that's all Obama's critics from the Republican/conservative side of America branded in one simple, provocative, inaccurate statement. How does he fare with his labeling of the Democrat/liberal opposition? Here, in contrast, he says "It's contentious to a degree on what passes for the Left in America" and goes on to describe such people as "perhaps representing the more social democratic spectrum of American political thought". In the spirit of his first statement, couldn't he have instead said, "It's contentious on the far-left"?
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On PM that evening, Carolyn Quinn talked to the Beeb's North America correspondent Paul Adams, who put the case for healthcare reform better than Obama himself (unless you like the president's style of rhetoric). I say that, but he wasn't paraphrasing the president at all. He was merely 'stating the facts to put the story in context':
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"America spends 2.5 trillion dollars a year and rising on healthcare."
"46 million Americans, by the most conservative estimate, have no health insurance cover at all and another 25 million are underinsured."
"A recent study found that the majority of all bankruptcies in 2007 were linked in one way or another to medical expenses."
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As soon as I heard this last one my ears pricked up. This study, unascribed by Adams, turns out - after a little foray into the internet - to be one researched by leading advocates for radical health care reform!
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/07/30/the_medical_bankruptcy_myth_97335.html
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A semblance of balance was achieved by Carolyn Quinn, who interviewed a Republican congressman, Paul Brown, and a Democrat senator, Lynn Woolsey. Both got similar times to speak. As they should! Still, Mr Brown was interrupted - unlike Ms Woolsey - and Carolyn's questions to the Republican was noticably less respectful that those to the Democrat.

"He told me why he calls the healthcare bill 'a stinking rotten fish'."
"You say that but over the past month we've seen the debate descend to pretty low levels, for example seeing posters of President Obama portrayed as Hitler and the accusations that Obama is a fascist. What did you think of those sort of campaigns? Did you condone them?"
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This last question was especially rich given the BBC's own record with Bush-as-Hitler posters!!!
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This mockery of one side of the two-sided debate continued on that night's The World Tonight, where Paul Adams returned to say, "The Americans have spent the summer in an angry, frankly often idiotic, debate", and - after saying that both sides got angry - played snippets of four angry, idiotic people, all from the anti-Obama side!! Adams went on to sing Obama's praises on the harp and with the psaltery: "High hopes and the loftiest of ambitions, Barack Obama taking office...promising to tackle the nation's ills. This president, already transformational in the eyes of many, offering the tantalising prospect of change across the board." His subsequent report, however, did balance the skeptical Professor Peter Morici of Maryland University with the wholly supportive Democrat congressman, Chris van Hollen - though it almost goes without saying that van Hollen got both the first and the last word!

Robin Lustig's own interviews with the liberal editor of The Nation magazine Katrina vanden Heuvel and David Kuhn of the conservative-leaning RealClearPolitics were, in contrast, wholly fair.