Crush Liberalism

The White House on Tuesday posted a three-minute video punching back at an old clip of President Barack Obama that was featured on the Drudge Report with the headline “Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will ‘Eliminate’ Private Insurance.”

The White House response features Linda Douglass, formerly an ABC News correspondent and now a White House official, showing Drudge’s homepage on the screen of her office computer.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director, said: “We intend to use a lot of the grassroots viral Internet techniques from the campaign to beat back the campaign of misstatements and outright falsehoods about the president’s efforts to reform health insurance.”

The video begins: “Hi. I’m Linda Douglass. I’m the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, and one of my jobs is to keep track of all the disinformation that’s out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this one — take a look at this one. This one says, ‘Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate PRIVATE Insurance.’

 “Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know the people who always try to SCARE people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a VERY false impression. The truth is that the president has been talking to the American people a LOT about health-insurance reform and what is at stake for them.

“So what happens is that because he’s talking to the American people so much, there are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time, and they take a phrase here and there — they simply cherry-pick and put it together, and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”

The video the White House seeks to rebut, labeled “SHOCK UNCOVERED,” was linked by Andrew Breitbart on his video site, Breitbart.tv, after a site called Naked Emperor News brought it to his attention.

The clip is labeled, “SEIU Health Care Forum 3/24/07,” and shows Obama saying: “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.”