Ad hominem political arguments and health care reform

My clock radio went off the last two mornings playing audio clips of people praising the recently deceased U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. No one trotted out those people for comment while conservatives had been heaping contempt on him for as many years as I am old enough to remember. But that's how things go when you die.

To be sure, he was an easy political target. He was the poster boy for why drinking, driving and philandering are a bad combination. And he was politically powerful enough to survive what would normally have been a career-ending scandal. His satisfied constituents reliably sent him back to Washington for term after term.

He passed a lot of bills to protect the powerless in society -- the sick, the disabled, the children. But he never lived to see universal health care passed. It had literally been his life's ambition.

And conservatives used that fact to try to inflame opposition to universal health care. Just call something "Teddy Kennedy's (fill in the blank)" and the Ditto-Heads (their own term for themselves!) would line up against it without understanding anything more.

In rhetoric, the study of the use of language for persuasion, it's called an "ad hominem" argument -- an argument "against the person." Rather than arguing the facts of someone's point of view, you attack the person holding that point of view.

It's reminiscent of a quote from Adm. Hyman Rickover: "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." (Adm. Rickover actually attributed it to an "unknown sage," but no one has been able to trace it definitively to anyone earlier.)

Politicians and the marketers creating their political ads have studied rhetoric, and they know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. They think you're stupid.

Since Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he'd been dragging himself into Washington long after it became unwise to do so, even collapsing at an event during President Obama's inauguration. He saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Had a bill been passed by the original August deadline, he would have lived to see his dream fulfilled. A lot of conservatives would have hated to have had that happen.

But they've now turned their vile towards Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. She is singled out for their scorn among all the people backing reform. Her sin seems to be simply being a woman in a position of power, which to a lot of people means "a shrew." People who have no idea what she actually stands for or has accomplished are distanced from health care reform by ads calling it "Nancy Pelosi's plan." (Reform opponents at least had the good sense to realize it would have looked bad for an ad calling it "Teddy Kennedy's plan" to be running when he finally died.)

Health care reform is an important issue, too important to be argued through ad hominem attacks, either against Nancy Pelosi or against any of the congresspeople on the conservative side. We live in a country where no one without health insurance would ever be left to die on the side of the road after a car accident, yet there may be little assistance forthcoming to pay the hospitals and medical providers who stepped forward to care for that uninsured person. If you want to live in a civilized society, to know that you can get care in a disaster and that you won't have to look at people lying on the street dying in front of you if they suffer a catastrophic illness, you have to share the cost of being in a civilized society.

Let's keep the arguments civilized, too, shall we?