By now you’ve probably seen one of those TV ads where 84-year-old small-screen legend Andy Griffith blatantly shills for ObamaCare. If not, take a look below at the first spot, entitled “1965.” Put your feet up on the antebellum veranda and listen to the guitar sweetly plucking and Andy gently extolling the benefits of the U.S. government’s incipient hostile takeover of one-sixth of the economy. You can practically smell the magnolias blossoming just outside the overcrowded, understaffed clinic you’ll be stuck in for days once the new law really takes hold.
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There’s something disturbingly Being John Malkovich about Griffith’s Being Andy Taylor routine in these ads. That said, you have to credit the ObamaCare marketing team for this stroke of advertising genius. How do you best sell a wildly unrealistic, Utopian health-care fantasy to a resistant American public? You hire the beloved star of a beloved show set in a beloved, unrealistic, Utopian fantasy town, naturally.
Or do you?
Because, paradoxically, that’s exactly what’s wrong with hiring Sheriff Taylor to pitch ObamaCare. Mayberry was an alien, antiseptic fantasy-land of normalcy run amok. Even by the pristine naive standards of rural 1960, that America never existed.
Having Andy Griffith cooing at us over the benefits of ObamaCare makes about as much sense as having Ray Walston (Bill Bixby’s “Uncle” Martin of My Favorite Martian) don his rabbit ear antennae to soft-soap us on the now mercifully moribund cap-and-trade bill. (Although Sheriff Taylor and Uncle Martin do have one thing in common–neither creature was of this world.)
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Now had the Obama ad team instead used Andy’s other celebrated TV persona –Ben Matlock — to hawk ObamaCare, it might have had a fighting chance. I don’t know about you, but I always preferred cranky Ben to stuffy Andy. Matlock was far better company than the asexual, forever-moralizing, holier-than-thou Taylor. (Come to think of it, Andy sounds an awful lot like the President.)
Compared to Andy Taylor, Ben Matlock had personality. First of all, he’d stick up for you–even if he thought it possible you’d killed someone. Sheriff Taylor might toss you in jail for littering or jaywalking. Matlock was always getting people out of jail, helping you fight the system; Andy was the system.
In addition to their differing views on the highest and best use of jail cells, Matlock was human. He had flaws. A wildly successful and wealthy defense attorney, nevertheless the man was too cheap to own more than one light-gray suit or spend more than a few bucks on lunch–a dubious-looking hot dog purchased from a two-bit street vendor with a push-cart. (By the way, in Obama’s czarist America that street vendor and his dangerous wares would have been regulated out of business long ago.)
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Matlock usually demanded his fee (or a healthy chunk of it) up-front. He understood the free market capitalist system was the best arbiter of individual freedom–literally. He could get you found not guilty, but you’d have to pay for it. Liberty had a price, the same way a carton of eggs did. Unlike in Mayberry, in the Land of Matlock there was no such thing as a free acquittal.
Ben was cantankerous, avaricious and, the way he ogled some of the hot young things around the office, even borderline lecherous. In short, he was lovable. He reminded us of us.
Sheriff Taylor on the other hand was all sanctimony, condescension and platitudes. (Sound like anyone we know?) Since I was never a big fan of The Andy Griffith Show, I don’t know how Sheriff Taylor wound up a widower. But my guess is he bored his wife to death–either with all those cloying renditions of dusty Americana prairie songs like “Turkey in the Straw” or with that annoying self-congratulatory altruism. Regardless of how he did it, I’m thinking not even Matlock could have gotten Taylor off that murder rap.
As Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness,
Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love–because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ben Matlock was a selfish, greedy, petulant sonofabitch. But if he had tried to sell me on ObamaCare, I’d probably have gone all in.
Still, something tells me Ben wouldn’t have cared much for the ironically-named Patient Protection (sic) and Affordable (sic) Care Act. Lifelong skinflints have a way of sniffing out a terrible waste of money.
Too bad, though. Because I’d give anything to see the episode where Matlock shouts down the Federal Hot Dog Coronary Endangerment Panel.