What does it take to ruin Thanksgiving? Is it being forced to work? Not having enough money to put food on the table? Or maybe bad weather that could make travel a nightmare?
Ask the nation’s top conservative pundits and they’ll tell you that President Obama is ruining your Thanksgiving by forcing you to talk about Obamacare.
Sean Hannity accused the president of “allow[ing] Obamacare to hijack your holidays.” His comments come in response to a push launched by Organizing for Action to encourage families to talk about health insurance over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The ads encourage people, especially parents, to talk to their uninsured children and other family members and encourage them to check out the new insurance exchanges and sign up for health care. The campaign includes some talking points to help people correct and refute some of the more negative reports about the healthcare.gov site that have come out since it was launched in October.
Suggested starter lines include “Have you thought about signing up for health insurance on the new marketplace?” and “Would you like to take some time with me to sign up right now?”
If that seems like a harmless conversation, then you must not be a conservative. The group that works itself up over the notional war on Christmas is now trumpeting the war on Thanksgiving.
According to Rush Limbaugh, this campaign proves OFA is “trying to corrupt every Thanksgiving dinner this season tomorrow by proselytizing and propagandizing in Obamacare.”
Over at the Daily Caller, the reporter who’s best known for heckling the president during a Rose Garden press conference last year says the president is pushing his “political priorities into Americans’ private family and religious events” and that OFA’s decision to ask their core members, those who have been supporters for the president’s policies for years, to encourage family to take a closer look at the much-maligned exchanges constitutes a “determination to gatecrash iconic family events” and reflects a “long-held pity and contempt for ordinary Americans.”
This latest round of attacks on the president and his health reform law come as good news starts to trickle out after an otherwise bad roll-out of the exchanges. In California, nearly 80,000 residents are enrolled, along with more than 75,000 from New York state, 50,000 in Kentucky, and nearly a 100,000 from Washington state.
That tracks with the latest polling too, which finds that a majority of all Americans think the website’s problems will be fixed, according to the CNN/ORC poll. Young Americans are even more likely to think that, with 71% saying they expect the problems to be fixed. Only one in four Americans in the 18 to 34 age bracket think the health care law is a failure, and most think it’s too soon to tell. So what harm could a little Thanksgiving table conversation really do?
Morgan Whitaker