In a world where health care reform is under siege and fear and confusion reign, President Barack Obama has only one way out — to release a different movie.
Opponents of the current reform effort have been hawking a nail-biter of a horror flick: Faceless government bureaucrats take over the health care system, destroy innovation, eliminate choice and empower government “death panels” to decide whether Grandma will live or die.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have three different versions of a 1,018-page bill in the House, seemingly endless negotiations in the Senate and a feud over something called the “public option.”
“Marley & Me,” this is not.
“We’re talking a lot about what’s our shooting schedule, who’s our key grip going to be, who’s going to do special effects, and we’re not telling the story enough,” says Eli Attie, former chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore and a writer and producer for “The West Wing” and “House, M.D.”
Strategists say that if the president hopes to turn the tide in favor of reform, he will need do more than offer policy prescriptions when he addresses Congress on Wednesday; he will have to generate a tight, vivid, emotionally compelling narrative to help people understand why they should get behind the plan.
But should he pen his own scary movie? A family drama? A feel-good film?
POLITICO asked those who straddle the worlds of politics and entertainment to offer their thoughts on how health reform advocates should pitch a wary public.
David Mixner, a longtime Democratic activist and a writer with two screenplays to his credit, recommends a straightforward drama: “A hardworking American family who has a young sick child, who has done everything right, suddenly sees their life upended, because of a lack of health insurance, or technicalities in their health insurance,” he says.
“To me, [the message is] real simple: We can no longer have Americans lose everything they’ve ever worked for because they’re sick. And this stops it," he says. "And I don’t know why we’ve strayed from that in some kind of zoopgobbledygook that no one understands.”
Attie agrees and expresses similar frustration with the Democrats’ failure to assert their own message.
“That we’ve become the pro-death party when they want to leave 45 million people uninsured is insane,” he says. “Their movie is the one where everyone dies in the end. Theirs is the slasher film, and ours is the heartwarming family drama.”
So what would a screenplay that made that argument look like? “It’s a story of an average American family facing all kinds of medical bills they can’t pay, health problems they can’t treat, medications they can’t buy and a knight in shining armor named Barack Obama comes along, and they all live happily ever after,” Attie says. “You think it’s going to be a tragedy, and it isn’t.”
Others argue that the opposition’s message has an edge-of-the seat urgency that requires more of a blockbuster response.
“There’s passion on the other side, and I don’t hear passion on the side of reform, and that’s maddening to me,” says Trey Ellis, a screenwriter and novelist whose credits include the HBO film “The Tuskegee Airmen,” and who blogs about politics for the Huffington Post.
He suggests a thriller — “along the lines of ‘Michael Clayton,’ ‘The Insider’ and ‘Traffic’” — that would reveal the human drama behind the status quo.
“The pre-credit sequence would show a young woman driving home from a party. She's the only sober one of her friends. Wham! A cab slams into them, totaling her little BMW and severely injuring only her. The ambulance comes and is racing her to the nearest hospital, which is private, when the paramedics are told, by her shaken friends, that she's uninsured. The paramedics are ordered to take her to the public hospital, 10 miles away ...
Fat-cat health insurance oligarchs meet at Hilton Head, blithely bragging about their profits and the joys of ‘rescission.’ ... One of the oligarchs gets an urgent call. It's his wife. Their estranged daughter has just been in an accident. She lost a leg because of the transfer to the more distant hospital.”
The insurance companies aren’t the only potential villain in a Democrat-directed drama about the need for health reform, says Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, who consulted on the publicity effort for Michael Moore’s health care documentary, “Sicko.”
“Historically, successful presidents create a dialectic with their über-message, where they are positioned as fighting for the American people and against a threat to America,” he says.
His film would be a Cold War-style chiller, with “jobs being swallowed up by foreign countries” and Obama and the Democrats in a race against time to save the nation from the “greedy insurance and drug industries,” which are sucking the nation dry financially. Their mission? To preserve “the core of what it means to be American," he says, "in an age where the rise of global challengers such as China imperils the American Dream.”
From Lehane’s geopolitical crane shot, Democratic strategist Shawn Lawrence Otto, who wrote and produced the film “House of Sand and Fog,” pans in on a small American town, suggesting that the Democrats look for inspiration in the Christmas favorite “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“I guess the log line is: Democrats are the party of Bedford Falls. It’s your choice: Bedford Falls or Potterville,” he says.
Variety managing editor Ted Johnson, who writes the Wilshire & Washington blog about the intersection of entertainment and politics, also invokes the Frank Capra classic.
“It seems like one of their troubles is that the Republicans have been so effective in capitalizing on the mistrust of government,” he says of the Democrats. “Whereas ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ doesn’t really deal with the government — it’s about this idea that we’re all in this together.”
Republican media consultant Stuart Stevens, who has written for TV series including “Commander in Chief” and “K Street,” says he thinks that thus far the Democrats’ message has been “oddly torqued”: “It’s a weird mix of change and status quo that hasn’t tied up: ‘If you like what you have, you don’t have to change’ — a status quo message — ‘but we’re going to bring significant change if you want it.’ It’s sort of like you’re at the Oxford Union, and Obama’s debating Obama,” he says.
He, too, mentions “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “You have to show people what the future’s going to look like. And if we don’t change, what’s it going to be like?” — but predicts that Democrats will offer up their own horror movie instead.
“Our health care system is collapsing. We’re going to be unable to sustain what we have. You have to fight to protect what you have. The demographic monster is coming to get us, and we have to fight that. It’s sort of a ‘while America slept’ argument,” he says. “I suspect that’s where they’re headed, because when emotions get that high, fear works more easily.”
Fear may indeed sell, but Attie notes that “downer moves are tanking at the box office” right now. He argues that what people want to hear most is an uplifting story about the future. “Yes, some horror movies are doing well,” he says, “but not as well as ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Transformers,’ movies about truth, justice and the American way — with robots.”
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