Susan G. Komen, Planned Parenthood, and the 'Teachable Moment'

One of the most abused terms in politics is "teachable moment." Most of the time, when someone says, "This is a teachable moment," what they're really saying is, "On the bright side, we've figured out an additional way to fail. We won't do that again." Besides, it's become threadworn and cliche. The way it's used currently, it's almost meaningless. With that in mind, I present you with an honest-to-goodness teachable moment.

The Atlantic Wire:

The Susan G. Komen foundation has reversed its position on Planned Parenthood, and will continue funding the organization after all, issuing a statement that apologizes "for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives." The move comes after a week of online protest over the news that Komen would end a grant to Planned Parenthood to provide mammograms. It was not a move that Komen took lightly. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg unearthed memos from December that show how the Komen foundation instructed its employees to "obfuscate the issues when confronted with questions about why Komen cut off funding to Planned Parenthood." The letters outline "updated eligibility requirements" that include changes in tax-exemption status and loss of federal funding, among other things.

The first lesson here is the most obvious; if you're a foundation dedicated to fighting a certain disease, don't make politically-motivated funding decisions that will actually increase the overall severity of that disease. Planned Parenthood offers cancer screenings -- for some women, the only access to such screenings they have -- and cutting funding would mean fewer screenings. Fewer screenings means more instances of undiagnosed breast cancer. You can do the math from there.

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The Purpose of Protest is Not to Win Friends

I wrote about this briefly yesterday and, given the events of today, it deserves a bit more fleshing out.

To bring you up to speed, Public Policy Polling released a survey yesterday finding that Occupy Wall Street was losing ground in public opinion. At the time, I wrote that this in itself wasn't anything to lose any sleep over, because Occupy Wall Street isn't up for election anywhere. Successful protest movements are seldom extremely popular -- both the anti-war and the anti-segregation movements in the '60s were unpopular at the time, regardless of how Hollywood portrays them now. What's important in a successful protest movement is that people agree with you. The point is to mold the national dialogue -- in other words, to change the subject -- and get people to debate the issue or issues that you believe are of primary importance. It doesn't matter if people approve of how you do it, because generally they won't. Public protest is disruptive and inconvenient, which is the entire point. People talk about inconvenience and, if somewhere in the conversation the sentence "They've got a point, though" pops up, then mission accomplished. It's not about you or getting people to like you, it's about getting people to talk about the issue.

Which was why the PPP's Tom Jensen's analysis bothered me (emphasis mine):

I don’t think the bad poll numbers for Occupy Wall Street reflect Americans being unconcerned with wealth inequality.  Polling we did in some key swing states earlier this year found overwhelming support for raising taxes on people who make over $150,000 a year. In late September we found that 73% of voters supported the ‘Buffett rule’ with only 16% opposed.  And in October we found that Senators resistant to raising taxes on those who make more than a million dollars a year could pay a price at the polls. I don’t think any of that has changed- what the downturn in Occupy Wall Street’s image suggests is that voters are seeing the movement as more about the ‘Occupy’ than the ‘Wall Street.’  The controversy over the protests is starting to drown out the actual message.

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The Argument that 99-Percenters Offer No Solutions is a Really Stupid Argument

Imagine you're driving along and you hear a sound somewhere under your car. "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung..." You're going to take that to a mechanic, right?

Now imagine that the mechanic asks you what you want to do about the sound. "I want you to fix it," you tell him.

"Sorry," he's says. "That's not specific enough. I need you to tell me exactly what needs to be done. What component I need to replace. What tools I need to do it. I need step-by-step instructions on exactly what repairs you want done."

"I'm not the mechanic," you answer, "you are! I just want you to fix the noise. I don't know how to do it."

"Come back when you have real solutions," the mechanic says.

That's the problem facing the American people and, specifically, the protesters in the streets of New York and other cities right now. The problem is obvious -- unemployment, a tax structure that's way to lopsided toward those at the top, corporate crime and runaway greed, out-of-control higher education costs, etc. Our entire economic system is going "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung." Yet, when the protesters point out there's obviously something wrong here, they're dismissed by politicians and the media for having no solutions.

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