By Henry R Irving

If Cambridge residents were asked about the summer of 2009’s most embarrassing moment, most would probably say it was the Gates affair. But there was plenty of rivalry for the award. The City Council’s enthusiasm to spend $35,000 promoting nuclear disarmament ranks up there…it’s just so Cambridge. Breaking news of unfunded city liabilities of around $1 billion is a good one, though our fair city has a lot of company at that trough.

Despite so many qualified competitors, my vote for the summer’s prize goes to the August so-called protest at the Whole Foods Market on Prospect Street, when a bunch of yobs from “Massachusetts Jobs for Justice” over-exposed themselves in public about a Wall Street Journal article written by the company’s CEO, John Mackey. Don’t you have to wonder, right off the bat, about people who protest a newspaper article? How often is ‘self-expression for me but not for thee’ expressed so clearly?

I’m often told partisanship is not cool in Cambridge. At present, the Democrats have a firm grip on the public podium when it comes to health care, advocating one idea, one tax, and one regulation after another. Meanwhile, the media writes off the GOP as brain dead on the issue. (That’s doesn’t square with me, having read many GOP ideas for health care reform, however media-neglected they may be.)

How funny, then, that an articulate CEO managed to bypass the media clampdown via the WSJ and laid out for all to read the ideas underlying market-based health care reform: high-deductible plans combined with HSAs, tax equivalence for employer-based and individually-owned plans, a nationwide insurance marketplace, repeal of politically-generated mandates, tort reform, cost transparency, Medicare reform, and easier ways for people to help others in need with voluntary tax-deductible donations.

And what results from Mr Mackey’s argument being read in the light of day? A call for a nationwide boycott of Whole Foods Market – the ones in Cambridge, too! Now that was only a direct threat to his business, his shareholders, and his employees. What, the boycotters worry?

Actually, it’s the so-called protesters who should be most embarrassed. There they were in pictures, standing up on Prospect Street holding signs equating insurance companies with “death panels.” They have every right to do that, but what on earth did their signs and so-called protest have to do with Mr Mackey’s article? Absolutely nothing, I suggest. They just saw red about relevant information actually reaching the marketplace of health care debate.

Maybe their fires of rage were lit by the Margaret Thatcher quote accompanying the WSJ article: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (It might annoy a socialist but why a run-of-the-mill protester unless the protester was a…)

One would think that to get riled up by either the article or the quote would require reading them. That’s another thing that’s embarrassing about this so-called protest. People I know in Cambridge got activated by the Whole Foods story, rallying to the boycott call. Maybe it got their old protesting juices churning. I found a simple cure for the ailment, though, when I ran a test on several friends. I sat them down at my table. I gave them a copy of Mr Mackey’s article and I asked them if they’d read it. They all said, “No.” I asked them to read it. When they read it, their palpitations stopped.

I’m not unaware that politics is hardball. Sure, a minute percentage of so-called protesters said vulgar things about President Obama at the 12 September Washington rally. Former President Bush fielded his share, too. The job of President is harsh, and dealing with that stuff comes with the paycheck. But using misleading information to encourage a boycott of a company that relies on its brand name to grow and provide jobs is an embarrassment of a different order. Maybe it didn’t originate in Cambridge. “Massachusetts Jobs for Justice” is a Jamaica Plain operation. Besides, the address doesn’t matter. I wonder if any embarrassment resides in the minds that the boycott springs from.

Henry R Irving is the chairman of the Cambridge Republican City Committee and lives on Bigelow Street.

The Right View is a bimonthly column submitted by a member of the Cambridge Republican City Committee.