A draft memo circulating among Democratic Health and Communications staff Thursday points to serious worry on the part of the Democrats about the fate of Obamacare following the Congressional Budget Office’s release yesterday of the bill’s preliminary score.
The memo’s author is unclear, but the tone and directives in it are not. It instructs recipients not to engage members of the media on specifics about the CBO score before the Sunday vote:
“We have increasingly noticed how right-wing fringe media are trying to pick apart the CBO score,” it reads. “We cannot emphasize this enough: do not allow yourself (or your boss) to get into a discussion of the details of CBO scores and textual narrative. Instead, focus on only the deficit reduction and number of Americans covered.”
Right-wing fringe media is trying to pick apart the score? That’s a pretty bold card for the writer of this missive to play, considering the only portion of the preliminary score contained in the memo is the bit about the $138 billion deficit reduction over the next decade. Unfortunately that’s less than 15 percent of the estimated $945 billion cost, over the same amount of time, to the American taxpayer. Of course that isn’t mentioned in this memo. Who’s cherry-picking now?
But that’s not the boldest of it. The memo, in a panicked tone, goes on to say: “… right-wing operatives and Republican sympathizers in the media .. are making a last-ditch effort to derail reform. Do not give them ground by debating details.”
If merely engaging in discussion of the facts of the bill will lessen the massive plan’s appeal, the advocates of Obamacare are in for quite a battle this weekend. Because America’s tax-paying electorate has a pesky habit of wanting to know details, such as what, exactly, it is indebting its as-yet unborn descendants for.
