A newly-founded group behind an ad showing an actor portraying President Obama throwing an elderly “grandma” off a cliff is sponsoring a rally with Rep. Paul Ryan (R) next week. The group, AmericanDoctors4Truth, is an offshoot of the anti-Obamacare group Docs4PatientCare and made the ad in response to a video from a liberal group which tied Ryan’s plan to reform Medicare with video of a man pushing an elderly woman to her presumable death.
Dr. Jane Hughes, one of the doctors involved with the group that made the ad, said in an interview with TPM that she and some friends “kept waiting and waiting for a response to the ‘granny ad’ and it never came, so we realized if we don’t do it it’s never going to come, and that was the impetus, cause it was an absolute gross misrepresentation of what had happened.”
Like the ad from the liberal group, the one-minute long AmericanDoctors4Truth ad opens to the tune of “America The Beautiful.” A man in an Air Force One jacket rolls an elderly woman in a wheelchair closer and closer to the cliff. “My doctor has told me that this pacemaker will save my life,” the woman says. “Oops, careful Mr. President, there is a cliff here,” she says as they approach the edge.
A voiceover of President Obama fades in. “You know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller.”
“No, no, I need a pacemaker,” the woman tells him. With that, “Obama” shoves her off the cliff. A longer version of the video shows a doctor catching the elderly woman before talking about alternative reform measures.
Hughes told TPM the ad came together after she spoke at a Docs4PatientCare national meeting.
“I stood up and said ‘I cannot believe that we’re absent, where are the doctors? Why didn’t anyone respond to the granny ad?’ And there happened to be a guy in the audience who was from L.A., and he came up and he approached me and he said we’ve got to talk,” she said.
That director was Michael Emerson, who has directed and produced historical biographies. Hughes said Emerson told her he “had connections with the conservative underground in Hollywood,” and they ended up going out to shoot the ad in L.A.
“It was just happenstance and partially luck that we all got together,” Hughes said, adding they were able to save money because they were “working with people who believed in the cause.”
She said the ad doesn’t have anything to do with supporting Ryan’s plan, but rather “setting the record straight about who pushed granny off the cliff.” Ryan is speaking at a “Hands Off My Health Care” rally sponsored by Americans for Prosperity in D.C. next week, an event Hughes said AmericanDoctors4Truth, a 501(c)4 organization, was co-sponsoring.
Hughes said the ad, which is running in Texas and Florida, wasn’t funded by some mysterious donor but that they had some donation offers come in after the ad was announced on Tuesday.
“So far it’s doctors that are paying for the ads, mainly it’s the group of us who started it,” Hughes said. “We’ve already had a very nice response in terms of requests to donate. We have some very good prospects for some very large donations. We’ve been very enthused with the response.”
Here’s the ad from AmericanDoctors4Truth, followed by the earlier ad from the liberal group Agenda Project.
