Progress Illinois

When it comes to the health care refom debate, GOP Rep. John Shimkus thinks liberals are using disingenuous figures to describe the size of the nation's uninsured population. "Forty-five million [people] sounds worse than than 15 million," he said on Springfield talk radio station WMAY yesterday morning. When asked where he got the 15 million figure, he cited a recent New York Times editorial that attempts to break down the unemployed population. Unfortunately, Shimkus didn't read the paper too carefully.

Here's his first oversimplication:

Internal mp3

SHIMKUS: One-third [of the 46 million uninsured] are people as you say that are either young adults in the job market they feel they are never going to get sick so they’re not purchasing. And the other part of that third are folks who make on average $75,000 a year or $88,000 for a family of four who could afford the private insurance market but they are making the decision not to do it. That’s one-third.

The Times cites census data showing that 9 million (19 percent of the uninsured) come from households with incomes of $75,000 or more. But the paper also recognizes that "many of these people live in 'households; that are groups of low-wage roommates or extended families living together." In other words, despite their aggregate household income, many lack the resources to purchase insurance on the open market. Only 4.7 million (10 percent) live in families that earn $88,000 for a family of four, which experts consider the threshold of affordability.

Of the 13 million people (28 percent) in their 20s living without insurance, the Kaiser Foundation also found that just 10 percent are college graduates and 5 percent have incomes above $60,000 a year. "Many of these younger people," the Times writes, "would be helped by reform bills that would provide subsidized coverage for the poor and an exchange where individuals can buy cheaper insurance than is now available." 

But you probably won't hear Shimkus citing that conclusion any time soon.

Here's his subsequent embellishment:

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Considerable ink has already been spilled over Senate Democrats' failed attempt to stem the foreclosure crisis: from Sen. Dick Durbin's frustrating negotiations with the trade groups over his mortgage modification bill, to the Obama administration's seeming indifference to the measure itself, to it's eventual defeat. So a New York Times article today by Stephen Labanton, the lastest installment in the paper's series examining the battle to reshape the financial industry, doesn't shed much new light on why the common-sense legislation went down in flames. But his report includes interesting new context regarding the Capitol Hill negotiations. It also reinforces Durbin's comment on WJJG in April that the banks "frankly own the place." From the Times: 

Documents and interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists and administration officials show that the banks defeated the bankruptcy change — the industry picturesquely calls it the “cramdown” provision — by claiming that it would push up interest rates and slow the housing market’s recovery, even though academic studies have countered such claims.

The industry also steadfastly refused offers to negotiate over a weaker version. And it poured millions of dollars into lobbying: four of the industry’s top trade groups spent nearly as much on lobbying in the first three months of this year as they did in all of 2001.

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It seems that conservatives will lob two major critiques at Barack Obama this election cycle. Straight from Nixonland, the first is based in what Mark Schmitt has called the identity politics of Americaness. Obama shouldn't lead this country because he's too cosmopolitan, too out of touch, too divorced from "our experiences." In short, he's not "The American President Americans Are Waiting For."

The second meme is one of experience, substance, and presentation. While Obama can electrify a crowd, his opponents argue, his foreign policy vision is naive and his rhetoric hollow. As Hillary Clinton so fiercely put it, he hasn't crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold." For two different examples of this line of argument, look no further than columns today by the Tribune's John Kass and The New York Times' David Brooks.

Let's start with Kass and his insinuation-heavy piece on Obama and Tony Rezko:

Obama's supporters don't know exactly what Obama believes in, but they seem not to care. He's on the way up and out of the wetlands of Chicago politics, reborn unto his national and mythic reform narrative, discovered by joyous national media and embraced, much as the iconic child was discovered and embraced when found in the reed basket floating on the River Potomac.

Right, John. Media brainwashing accounts for why millions of Americans might support a candidate who holds the majority position on the war, health care, and the environment.

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