April 18, 2010 07:03 PM UTC

Meet "Permanent Bailouts," The New "Death Panel"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Who cares if what you’re saying is true, as long as it’s been focus grouped to produce the results you want? As the Washington Post reports:

“Big bank bailouts! Big bank bailouts!”

So goes the refrain for Republican leaders this week, whose escalating attacks on a proposed overhaul of the financial regulatory system center on charges that the legislation perpetuates taxpayer-funded rescues of big Wall Street firms.

Democrats have remained equally persistent in dismissing such claims as “false talking points” and a “parade of bamboozlement,” according to Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), the bill’s author. They argue that their legislation does just the opposite, ensuring that failing financial firms would be shut down and that their management teams, shareholders and creditors would suffer painful losses — all without a dollar of taxpayer money at stake.

As shouting senators from both sides try to sway public opinion, Democrats on Thursday signaled a willingness to bet that they have the stronger hand.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he plans to bring the financial overhaul bill to the Senate floor as soon as next week — earlier than expected. The strategy, according to Obama administration officials and congressional aides, is to pressure Republicans by daring them to make an election-year vote against legislation that Democrats have portrayed as essential to reforming Wall Street…

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has labeled it a “bailout fund,” a criticism some Democrats call laughable.

“This is the irony of ironies. The $50 billion provision in this bill was proposed by Republicans,” Dodd said on the Senate floor Thursday, noting that the bill the House passed last year set up a $150 billion fund. “The idea of requiring these institutions to put up money in advance so that if they fail, they end up paying for the cost of unwinding it — who would object to that?”

If you put it that way it’s likely true that few people would, which is why Sen. Mitch McConnell has taken to booming the words ‘big bank bailouts’ into every microphone he can find. It’s not really that different from the health care reform debate, when Republicans found touring the country warning of ‘death panels’ infinitely preferable to discussing what the plan might actually do–since the specific components of the health reform bill were broadly supported in polling. In this case, McConnell doesn’t want to tell you that he’s arguing the case of those very same big banks, who are solidly opposed to the financial reform bill.

Sure it’s dishonest–but is it really unprecedented? Employing the wild Orwellian rhetoric of ‘death panels’ didn’t stop the passage of health care reform, but it did help weaken support for it on the margins–and gave the far right paranoid justification to “resist” not just health care reform, but anything else Obama proposed in the future. No matter how ridiculous it seems to you, or even openly contemptuous of the truth, there are millions of Americans who will hear McConnell call a bill to end bailouts a “permanent bailout,” and believe him as surely as they believe that Obama wants to kill their Grandma. If you think it’s stupid, you’re just not in the target audience.

It’s going to be like this until November, folks, on about every issue you can think of, because those same millions of Americans most susceptible to such clean breaks from reality–from “death panels” to “permanent bailouts”–are the wave voters Republicans across the nation are counting on.