©Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com - November 18, 2014

At a on Sunday news conference in Brisbane, Australia, Fox News correspondent Ed Henry bluntly asked President Barack Obama whether, as Jonathan Gruber alleged, he misled the American people to get the Affordable Care Act passed.

“No. I did not," said Obama without conviction, a line that eerily echoed Richard Nixon’s famously unfortunate denial, “I’m not a crook” some forty years prior.

In fact, however, Obama misled the American people in numerous ways to get his eponymous bill passed. And among the many fictions he spun was one that was much too close to home to blame on the Grubers in his employ.

In his second debate with Senator John McCain in 2008, just before he said, “if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor. There’s no mandate involved,” then-senator Obama said something even more deeply dishonest.

Responding to a question by the moderator, Tom Brokaw, as to whether health care was a right or a responsibility, Obama answered, “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of fifty-three and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, died in November 1995 in Hawaii where she was staying with her mother. This was the same year Obama launched his political career. Although he did not go see her before she died, he exploited her death on the campaign trail. “I have seen what it's like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system,” he said in 2007. “And it's wrong. It's not who we are as a people.”

In Iowa in 2007, the Obama team ran a saccharine 30-second ad called “Mother” that made this same claim. The ad also promised that Obama’s health plan would "cover everyone.” This promise, like the “no mandate” promise, was catnip for the “stupid” voters. It had no chance of being realized.

The temptation is to call the exploitation of a dying relative a new political low, but that would be unfair to Al Gore. As vice president, Gore pioneered that unhallowed ground at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. There Gore told a maudlin tale of how he knelt by the bedside of his nicotine-addicted sister Nancy, then dying of lung cancer, squeezed her hand, and said, “I love you.”

“That is why,” he thundered, “until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.” This speech might have had more punch had Gore not campaigned for president as a friend of tobacco four years after his sister’s death. “All of my life,” he crowed at the time, “I hoed it, chopped it, shredded it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.”

Obama got to reprise his mother’s swan song for years. It was not until July 2011, and then not until page A16, that the New York Times revealed his mendacity. According to a biography of Obama’s mother written by the Times’ own Janny Scott, Obama had “mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.”

Although largely flattering, Scott’s bio revealed that Ann Dunham’s employer-provided Cigna health policy offered full coverage and paid her hospital bills directly. Dunham had “to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

Also left unsaid by Obama was that his mother was working in Indonesia for the Ford Foundation when she first took ill. The local physicians, working in that nation’s socialized health care industry, diagnosed her problem as indigestion. No ideologue when it came to her own health, Dunham flew to New York to get diagnosed and treated on Cigna’s dime at the famed Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.

Scott based her reporting on letters between Cigna and Dunham. Reported the Times, “A White House spokesman chose not to dispute either Ms. Scott’s account or Mr. Obama’s memory, while arguing that Mr. Obama’s broader point remained salient.”

Yes, the broader point, the pravda, always remains salient in Obamaland. To his credit, the Times’ Kevin Sack challenged that contention. He quoted the Harvard health policy professor Robert J. Blendon to the effect that if these facts had been known in 2008, “People would have considered it a significant error.” Blendon added: “I just took for granted that it was a pre-existing condition health insurance issue.”

Had Obama let the story die at this point, it would have been easier to forgive him, but he did not. He and his campaign team knew how well the story worked in the 2008 campaign, and they likely figured it would work again in 2012 with a little tweaking.

The vehicle they used to revive the fraud was the documentary-style campaign video, “The Road We’ve Traveled.” The narration by lovable Hollywood everyman Tom Hanks lent the video an added credibility, as did the supportive commentary by Michelle Obama. Covering the following audio sequence were heart-tugging images of Obama and his mom:

Hanks: He knew from experience the cost of waiting [on health care reform].

Obama: When my mom got cancer, she wasn’t a wealthy woman and it pretty much drained all her resources.

Michelle: She developed ovarian cancer, never really had good, consistent insurance. That’s a tough thing to deal with, watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented. I don’t think he wants to see anyone go through that.

Hanks: And he remembered the millions of families like of his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.

“Something that could have been prevented?” Here, Michelle very nearly accused Cigna of killing her mother-in-law. That did not surprise those monitoring the Obama campaign. A pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, had been running ads implying that Mitt Romney’s cruelty had led to the cancer death of a women whose husband had once worked for a Bain-controlled company. That was just how the “most transparent administration in history” rolled.

Liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, holder of the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, put it best: “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.”

Jack Cashill’s new book, You Lie! The Evasions, Omissions, Fabrications, Frauds, and Outright Falsehoods of Barack Obama, is now available wherever you buy books.