White House Attacks Drudge for Exposing Obama's Goal to Eliminate Private Health Insurance

The White House is striking back at recent revelations about what presidential candidate Barack Obama stated during the campaign concerning his desire to create a universal healthcare system in America and eliminate private health insurance.

On Monday, the Drudge Report linked to a video created by our friends at Naked Emperor News -- first reported by NewsBusters Sunday -- that contained clips of Obama making statements about healthcare that quite contradict what he's currently telling the American people as he pushes for radical reform (embedded right).

To counter what was in this video, the White House created one of its own as reported by Politico Tuesday (embedded below the fold):

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."

Cherry-pick, Linda? Make it sound like Obama's saying something that he didn't really say?

Well, in our piece published Sunday, we included a more complete transcript of what candidate Obama told folks at SEIU's New Leadership Health Care Forum on March 24, 2007:

As I indicated before, I think that we're going to have to have some system where people can buy into a larger pool. Right now their pool typically is the employer, but there are other ways of doing it. I would like to -- I would hope that we could set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But 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 where we've got a much more portable system. Employers still have the option of providing coverage, but many people may find that they get better coverage, or at least coverage that gives them more for health care dollars than they spend outside of their employer. And I think we've got to facilitate that and let individuals make that choice to transition out of employer coverage.  

Furthermore, we provided our readers links to the complete video of what candidate Obama said that day and the complete transcript.

By contrast, Douglass DIDN'T address what Obama said that day. Instead, she shared with viewers clips of what he's saying NOW!

Clearly, the White House -- and, sadly, the Obama-loving media -- don't want Americans to know what candidate Obama said about this issue.

That leaves the new media to carry the water for so-called journalists who have abdicated their solemn responsibility to report the truth in order to advance their agenda.

In the end, it appears the White House doesn't appreciate its lack of control over this medium.

Too bad!