I think Matt and Kevin are right that there's no way to stop lying about the content of a proposed program, and the question is simply how to counteract the lies. The real difficulty of this problem is brought into focus by the fact that it's Betsy McCaughey doing the lying about Obama's health care bill.
McCaughey, as some of you will remember, wrote an article that, along with providing a forum for Charles Murray's racist junk science, was the nadir of the Andrew Sullivan-edited New Republic. A few months back, Ezra explained the history:
Betsy McCaughey first came to prominence for a New Republic article entitled "No Exit." The conceit of the piece was that unlike everyone else, McCaughey had pored over every page and paragraph of the massive Clinton health bill and come back with a clearer view of the legislation's contours than anyone had previously presented. And what she'd found was worrying. "The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey wrote. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you." Hence, "No Exit." You were trapped in the system.
McCaughey, it turned out, isn't a very good reader. Section three of the Clinton health legislation ("Protection of Consumer Choice") held that, "nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services.” But in a policy debate, it's more important that your opinions prove convenient than accurate, and McCaughey's argument was certainly convenient: She got first one cover story in The New Republic and then a second. George Will picked up her views, as did the rest of the right wing media and legislative infrastructure. And this wasn't a "provocative" argument. It was simply wrong. It argued that the legislation said X when the legislation said not-X. It remained an enduring black mark on The New Republic's reputation. When Frank Foer took over as editor, among his first acts was making amends. “We recanted that story in the first issue and apologized for it," he says. It was that bad.
So, to recap: McCaughey made 1) devastating claims about the Clinton health-care bill, that 2) were plainly and demonstrably false. And, yet, far from being permanently discredited, she seems to have no problem being given public platforms to do the same thing this time. Dealing with this kind of political situation is very difficult, but at a minimum Democrats need to make McCaughey's history of similar lying as widely known as possible when these false claims come up.
--Scott Lemieux
