Last fall, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Jill Stanek’s anti-abortion group, BornAliveTruth.org, launched a major attack on Obama, using a very personal and heart-wrenching TV ad (featuring “abortion survivor” Gianna Jesson). As Christine Bowman notes on Buzzflash, the PR company behind the project was Virginia-based CRC Public Relations , a firm that has now been hired by Conservatives for Patients Rights, a group whose intention is to put the kybosh on the Obama administration’s plans for reforming health care.
CRC Public Relations has been down the putting-the-kybosh-on-something/one before. Founded in 1989 by a group led by CRC’s current chairman, Leif Noren, the organization was a major player in the Swiftboating of Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Conservatives for Patients Rights is chaired by Rick Scott, a controversial fellow in his own right. Scott was recently described by the Washington Post as “a multimillionaire investor and controversial former hospital chief [that] has become an unlikely and prominent leader of the opposition to health-care reform plans that Congress is expected to take up later this year.”
Christine Bowman points to Scott’s previous involvement in healthcare: He “was ousted as head of Columbia/HCA in the ’90s — a company that eventually had to pay $1.7 billion in fines for having overbilled the federal government and states for services it provided to sick and vulnerable Americans.” Scott also partnered up with George W. Bush in owning the Texas Rangers baseball team, whose key players as have been extensively reported, were drenched in steroids.
The Washington Post pointed out that CPR’s current television ads “feature horror stories from Canada and the United Kingdom: Patients who allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn’t get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment.”
“Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care,” says Scott, “Tell Congress to listen, too.”
Scott has put up $5 million “of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program,” the Post reported.
“Everybody wants to say I’m against Obama’s plan, but I’m not necessarily,” Scott said in an interview. “The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path.”
CRC’s client list has on it a number of conservative advocacy groups, think tanks, links to the Republican Party, conservative philanthropy funded organizations, and media outfits, and includes Americans for Fair Taxation, Americans for Hope, Growth & Opportunity, the Discovery Institute, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Bozell’s Parents Television Council, Regnery Publishing, and Phillip Anschutz’s Walden Media.
As I reported late last year for MediaTransparency, SourceWatch , a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, pointed out that CRC was involved “in an attempt to hold [New York] Senator Charles Schumer responsible” for the collapse of California’s IndyMac Bank. SourceWatch reported that in late June, Schumer, the chair of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, “went public with his concerns about the bank.” A number of former bank employees — with the assistance of CRC — claimed that the Senator’s negative assessments of IndyMac led to a run on the bank, “with depositors taking out a net $1.3 billion in the following two weeks,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
The former employees accused Schumer of “a malicious, politically motivated act.” CRC circulated a letter from the employees to California Attorney General Jerry Brown to major media. “The letter, signed mostly by former staffers at IndyMac’s now-shuttered mortgage operation, asks Brown to investigate Schumer and to prosecute him under a state law making it a misdemeanor to spread false and damaging statements or rumors about a bank,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Over the past few years, CRC, ranked the fiftieth largest independent PR agency in the U.S. in 2008: created controversy during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito, Jr., claiming that the Democrats grilling of Alito caused his wife to leave the hearing in tears; was hired by Viacom’s Paramount Pictures to build support among conservatives and evangelicals for Oliver Stone’s film “World Trade Center”; and was hired by the National Abstinence Education Association to counter negative attacks on abstinence only sex education programs.
Swiftboating John Kerry; a slam dunk.
Swiftboating Barack Obama; not so much.
Swiftboating health care reform; stay tuned.
