The Center for American Progress’s Misleading Ad Campaign

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank funded to the hilt by George Soros, has released a series of ads arguing for "progressivism."  It’s part of a recent effort by the Left to rebrand itself because of the negative connotations that have come to be associated with the word "liberal." Two of the ads are actually pretty good, though I’m not sure that either will do much for their cause. Listing out things that almost no one is opposed to — civil rights, women’s suffrage — and calling them progressive isn’t going to convince many people who look even a little bit further.

The other two ads are less successful.  Both riff on the Apple "switch" ad campaign, a concept now tired and over-parodied (our friends at Bureaucrash did it more than a year ago), and this one is particularly irritating.  It intimates, as liberals tend to do, that conservatives are against everyone having health care. That’s simply not the case. What conservatives and limited-government supporters of all stripes are against is being forced, by the government, to buy health insurance, which is exactly what both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (as well as the Center for American Progress) want to do.

I’m sort of tired of refuting this at this point, but there’s just no reason to think that one must support multibillion dollar government-mandated, government-run health insurance programs in order to to also support good health care. In fact, what free-marketers want is to make health care cheaper and more accessible by reducing regulations and requirements that force prices upward and equalizing the health insurance purchasing power between employers and individuals.  We want to encourage personal savings for health care expenditures, and we want to free health care insurers and providers from the strangling confines of bureaucratic control. And we want individuals to have more control and more freedom over their money, their care, and their lives.

But of course, if the Center for American Progress admitted that, it might not have such an easy time selling its political ideology.