“Lights, camera, agitprop!”

Michelle Malkin’s column on the North Korea-like gathering of regime-friendly physicians at the White House yesterday starts with the white lab coats gimmick, but doesn’t stop there. Malkin shows the organizational provenance of these supposed grass-roots doctors: they come from Obama campaign-related organizations funded by George Soros.

The fact that someone in the White House thought up this affair, and that no one in the White House, including the president, saw the inappropriateness of it and stopped it, suggests a presidency that is bizarrely out of touch with reality. And here I will make the kind of statement which other conservatives make all the time, but which I almost never make: imagine what the media would say if Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush had brought 150 supportive doctors to the White House to back up some favorite bill of his and dressed them up in white lab coats.

Obamacare’s spin doctors
By MICHELLE MALKIN
New York Post
October 7, 2009

LIGHTS, camera, agitprop! The curtains opened on yet another artfully staged performance of ObamaCare Theater this week. On the plush lawn outside the West Wing, 150 doctors took their places. The president approved the scenery: “I am thrilled to have all of you here today, and you look very spiffy in your coats.”

White House wardrobe assistants guaranteed the “spiffy.” As The Post’s Charles Hurt reported yesterday, the physicians “were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.” Obama’s aides hastily handed out costumes to those who came in suits or dresses before the doc-and-pony show began.

But while Halloween came early to the Potomac, these partisan single-payer activists in White House-supplied clothing aren’t fooling anyone.

Obama’s spin doctors belong to a group called “Doctors for America,” which organized the White House event in conjunction with Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign outfit.

OFA and DFA are behind a massive new ObamaCare ad, letter-writing and doctor-recruitment campaign. The supposedly “grass-roots,” nonprofit DFA is a spin-off of Doctors for Obama, a 2008 campaign arm.

DFA claims to have thousands of members with a “variety of backgrounds.” But there’s little diversity in their views on socialized medicine (98 percent want a taxpayer-funded public-insurance option)—or in their political contributions.

DFA President and co-founder Dr. Vivek Murthy, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, served as a member of Obama’s Health Policy Advisory Committee and New England Steering Committee during the 2008 presidential campaign.

DFA vice president Dr. Alice Chen of Los Angeles is an Obama donor and avowed supporter of Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign shop run by the Democratic National Committee. On Monday, she posted on the OFA Web site an appeal to Democratic activists for letters to the editor in support of Obama’s “health care reform.”

DFA “senior adviser” Jacob Hacker is an ObamaCare architect who laughed at criticism of the plan being a Trojan horse for single-payer coverage. “It’s not a Trojan horse, right?” he retorted at a conference held by the far-left Tides Foundation. “It’s just right there! I’m telling you. We’re going to get there.”

At theconservatives.com, Brian Faughnan has compiled information on DFA doctors’ political donations. Dr. Hershey Garner (who stood on stage with Obama at the White House event) has given more than $10,000 in donations to Democratic candidates since 2001. Dr. Amanda McKinney (who also flanked Obama on Monday) has given $2,750.

Who unveiled Doctors for America earlier this spring? No, not ordinary citizens outside the Beltway. The decidedly un-grass-roots sponsors of the Doctors for America launch were Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, and the left-wing Center for American Progress—which is run by liberal operative John Podesta and underwritten by far-left billionaire George Soros.

CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care for America Now coalition, the “grassroots” lobbying group for Obama’s health-care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, DC, with a $40 million budget.

It’s all in keeping with the elaborate Kabuki productions that have marked Team Obama’s efforts to manufacture support for government-run health care. They’ve been doctoring it up from Day One.

malkinblog@gmail.com

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 07, 2009 09:45 PM | Send