ALAN FRAM Associated Press Writer
With the nation's $46 billion biological drug market at stake, the war between makers of the pricey biotech medicines and their would-be generic competitors has involved millions of dollars in lobbying, thousands in campaign contributions and uncounted visits to members of Congress. And one noteworthy letter.
The note from the private National Health Council, sent to House leaders drafting health overhaul legislation, said the plea was on behalf of "the more than 133 million Americans living with chronic diseases and disabilities and their family caregivers." It urged lawmakers to protect the makers of high-technology biological medicines against early competition from lower-cost generic copycats.
The letter did not mention that nearly $1.2 million of the council's $2.3 million budget in 2007 came from the pharmaceutical industry's chief trade group and 16 companies that sell or are developing the brand-name biotech drugs.
The July 20 letter is an example of a favored lobbying tactic — special interests quietly financing private groups that may take their side as respected, seemingly independent allies without obvious financial interests in the outcome. It also underscores how both sides are using every weapon at their disposal as they battle over an issue that will affect millions of Americans but has been overshadowed by Congress' larger struggle over reshaping the nation's health care system.
Biotech drugs, made from living cells that treat diseases from cancer to psoriasis, can cost a patient tens of thousands of dollars per year. Amgen Inc. and the other companies that make them want their products protected from generic products for at least 12 years, and have won early congressional votes on the issue, due in part to a lopsided edge in lobbying resources. Their generic rivals want to cut that waiting period to five years.
In its letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and other leading legislators, the council argued for at least 10 years of exclusivity, saying the longer protection would encourage biotech companies to keep developing products. The generic drug industry sees that as supporting the biotech companies, but council vice president Marc Boutin says its position is a balance of the views of the 50 patient advocacy groups, like the March of Dimes, that comprise the heart of his organization.
"The sponsors have no control or input" into council projects, Boutin said.
Manufacturers say they need the longer protection to earn a profit on biotech drugs, which can take over $1 billion and a decade to bring to market. Generic companies say waiting that long would discourage them from developing competing products and would keep drug prices high — just when President Barack Obama is trying to lower medical costs as part of his reshaping of health care.
The White House has proposed seven years of protected marketing for brand-name drug makers.
The health council's letter lists its board members, which include the drug makers Amgen and Pfizer Inc., along with patient groups and other companies and medical industry organizations. The council's Web site lists many of the contributions it receives from these groups, another rarity.
"Is all their work bad? No," Steven Findlay, health analyst for Consumers Union, which backs the shorter five-year period, said of the council and other patients' groups that accept medical companies' financing. "But when it comes to health care reform and biogenerics, are they going to oppose the industry on that? No."
Billy Tauzin, president of the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which gave the health council $290,000 in 2007, called them "a great organization" with unchallenged credibility.
"We'll stand by them whether or not they agree with us, any day," said Tauzin, who is also on the council's board.
The lobbying battle has so far been one-sided. The Senate health committee voted 16-7 for a 12-year protection period last month, while Waxman's House energy panel voted 47-11 for 12 years of protection last Friday on an amendment by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who has numerous biotech firms in or near her Silicon Valley district.
That dominance is partly due to a huge disparity in money, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Senate Office of Public Records.
Representing biotech companies, the Biotechnology Industry Organization has spent $3.7 million lobbying so far this year. Their ally, Tauzin's association of drug makers, has spent $13.1 million — the second most of any group that lobbies in Washington.
The main group opposing them, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, has spent $1.1 million lobbying this year. Another group, a coalition of generic drug companies, insurers and large employers, has spent another $180,000, though most of its members — like AARP and the General Motors Corp. — are more focused on the overall bill and are devoting few resources to the generic fight.
Individual biotech companies like Amgen are also easily outspending their generic rivals such as Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc.
The one-sidedness extends to campaign contributions, too. The biotech organization contributed $192,000 to federal candidates in the two-year 2008 election cycle, the pharmaceutical association $155,000. The generic association: $51,000.
All that money has let the biotech industry launch a lobbying blitz, with targets including lawmakers from biotech-heavy states like California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and North Carolina.
The biotech organization has brought its CEOs to Washington, and has run print and radio ads in the states of pivotal lawmakers. The pharmaceutical association has helped organize lobbying by universities that conduct biotech research and venture capitalists who invest in such firms, and paid for a Duke University study that concluded biotech firms need 12 to 16 years of protection from generic competitors to break even.
With Democrats controlling Congress, doctor and former national Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has spoken out for the biotechs — though initially he did not reveal he worked for a law firm advising the biotechnology organization. Former Rep. Ron Klink, D-Pa., and Charles Brain, a former top House Democratic health aide, are lobbying on the biotech side.
"They don't do one thing, they do everything," said a frustrated Katie Huffard, a GOP lobbyist leading the generic coalition. "They are a very formidable, powerful presence."
Other big pharmaceutical contributors to the health council included Pfizer, $184,000; Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, $141,000; and Eli Lilly and Co., $131,000.
Monday, August 03, 2009
18 clever time-savers for super busy people
Story Highlights
Send out birthday cards once a month
Turn over the role of meal planner and cook to your family
Quick breakfast: Put all fruit, milk, silken tofu, or yogurt in the blender pitcher
Stow a small paper shredder near the mail to destroy credit-card offers
By Amanda Hinnant; additional reporting by Laine Siklos and Winnie Yu
(REAL SIMPLE) -- Ingenious ideas from (and for) busy women everywhere.
Designate a space for "in use" cups
Create a special spot on the kitchen counter where everyone can put half-filled coffee mugs that need to be reheated, water glasses to be used again later, or sippy cups that can be refilled.
At the end of the day, put everything that's still out into the dishwasher. It cuts down on kitchen clutter, and it also avoids shouts across the house of "Are you done with that coffee yet?"
Presort the family laundry
Clean laundry is only half the battle it still needs to be sorted and put away.
Save those steps by keeping washer-and-dryer-safe mesh bags (27-by-36-inch mesh bag, $8, stacksandstacks.com) in each kid's room one for lights, one for darks.
Throw the bags directly into the washing machine and dryer, then hand them back to the kids. If they're old enough, they can do their own folding.RealSimple.com: Get organized using everyday items
Minimize trips to the garbage can
While preparing a meal, keep a big bowl on the counter. Put all your chopping, cutting, and peeling discards into it, then make one trip to the garbage instead of 10.
Make a quick breakfast
Put all your fruit, milk, silken tofu, or yogurt in the blender pitcher and store the pitcher in the refrigerator overnight. (You can even prechop a banana. It will brown, but that will not affect the flavor of the shake.
In the morning, set it on the blender and press the button. RealSimple.com: 30 tips for easy outdoor entertaining
Put the kids to work
Tired of hearing "What's for dinner?" and "That again?"
Turn over the role of meal planner and cook to your family.
Ask each person to choose a night that suits his or her schedule (some family members may need to make a few meals each week), fill in a dinner menu, and add the needed ingredients to the grocery list.
Make the rules simple: a different menu every night, and only one pasta dish per week.
Everyone's food issues (allergies, picky taste buds) must be addressed. Every menu must be healthy and include vegetables. Include a dish-duty sign-up, too.
Prepare sandwiches for dinner
When in doubt, whip up a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner to save time.
Make it with natural peanut butter, real fruit jam, and whole-grain bread. That way it's "real" food, unlike many of the additive-laden prepackaged meals so widely available now.
Keep an everything datebook
Buy a weekly calendar. Jot down all the traditional things: school events, birthdays, appointments.
But use it to keep track of nontraditional things, too.
Write down bills that come through the mail and mark their due dates six days ahead.
Plan weekly dinner menus and write them on the calendar. Use it to also record the kids' long-term assignments.
That helps prevent those evenings of racing around to do everything at the last second. RealSimple.com: Systems for managing your mail
Never miss another birthday
Send out birthday cards once a month. Receiving one early is better than not receiving one at all.
Have a shredder ready
Stow a small paper shredder near the mail to destroy credit-card offers and "checks."
Try a double-duty dustbin
Empty your bathroom garbage can and use it as a bucket when you wash your bathroom and hardwood floors.
Rinse it in the tub, then fill it with white vinegar and water. Both the floors and the garbage can are clean when you're done.
Start a recipe chain letter
Planning menus and getting the ingredients together for a quick meal after work can be time-consuming.
That's where the recipe-exchange "chain letter" comes in. Have friends send you their favorite easy-to-make recipes, then you forward them on.
In addition, keep a few cookbooks at the office and download recipes from the Internet to a folder on the computer.
Photocopy or print out the ingredients list while at work and then buy groceries during lunch or on the way home.
Squeeze now, use later
If you have leftover lemons and limes from a cocktail party, squeeze them and freeze the juice in an ice-cube tray.
Once they're frozen, store the cubes in zippered plastic bags and use them for recipes that call for fresh lemon or lime juice. (One cube equals about one tablespoon of juice.)
Keep an ongoing shopping list
Whoever unwraps the last bar of soap from the four-pack or scrapes the last spoonful of mayo out of the jar should be responsible for writing it down on the shopping list.
Time-stamp your photos
When you get your photographs developed, label the envelopes before leaving the store.
On the top of the envelope, jot down the date, subjects, or activity. It's easier than trying to remember the details later.
Or take it one step further and throw out right there in the store any flattering, uninteresting, or unclear photographs.
Get ready for morning the night before
Set out everything you can -- dry breakfast ingredients, clothes, backpacks and bags, and lunches -- before going to bed.
It means fewer things to think about when you wake up and you're getting ready to leave the house.
Create a beauty station
Hang a mirror by the door, along with a basket filled with last-minute primping tools.
You won't have to run all over the house looking for brushes, barrettes, sunscreen, hand lotion, or various makeup essentials: It's all in the basket.
Start a day-by-day shelf system
To get out the door more quickly each day, dedicate baskets or shelves to specific days of the week.
When you remove things from your bag at night, place each item on the appropriate shelf or in the correct basket.
Designate a certain spot for everyday items like your wallet, transit card, and cell phone.
Organize your hand-me-downs
Keep a "future bin" in the kids' closets for hand-me-downs you get from others and anything that's too big for them right now.
Purge their closets once a season. Put removed items in one of three places: a younger sibling's "future bin", the charity bin, or the trash.
Many charities, such as Goodwill, call quarterly to let you know they will have a truck in the area, so you don't have to load your car and make an extra trip.
When they call, leave the bin out front for pickup, and they'll hang the receipt (for tax purposes) on your doorknob.
This is also a good time to get rid of any toys that the kids have outgrown.
Send out birthday cards once a month
Turn over the role of meal planner and cook to your family
Quick breakfast: Put all fruit, milk, silken tofu, or yogurt in the blender pitcher
Stow a small paper shredder near the mail to destroy credit-card offers
By Amanda Hinnant; additional reporting by Laine Siklos and Winnie Yu
(REAL SIMPLE) -- Ingenious ideas from (and for) busy women everywhere.
Designate a space for "in use" cups
Create a special spot on the kitchen counter where everyone can put half-filled coffee mugs that need to be reheated, water glasses to be used again later, or sippy cups that can be refilled.
At the end of the day, put everything that's still out into the dishwasher. It cuts down on kitchen clutter, and it also avoids shouts across the house of "Are you done with that coffee yet?"
Presort the family laundry
Clean laundry is only half the battle it still needs to be sorted and put away.
Save those steps by keeping washer-and-dryer-safe mesh bags (27-by-36-inch mesh bag, $8, stacksandstacks.com) in each kid's room one for lights, one for darks.
Throw the bags directly into the washing machine and dryer, then hand them back to the kids. If they're old enough, they can do their own folding.RealSimple.com: Get organized using everyday items
Minimize trips to the garbage can
While preparing a meal, keep a big bowl on the counter. Put all your chopping, cutting, and peeling discards into it, then make one trip to the garbage instead of 10.
Make a quick breakfast
Put all your fruit, milk, silken tofu, or yogurt in the blender pitcher and store the pitcher in the refrigerator overnight. (You can even prechop a banana. It will brown, but that will not affect the flavor of the shake.
In the morning, set it on the blender and press the button. RealSimple.com: 30 tips for easy outdoor entertaining
Put the kids to work
Tired of hearing "What's for dinner?" and "That again?"
Turn over the role of meal planner and cook to your family.
Ask each person to choose a night that suits his or her schedule (some family members may need to make a few meals each week), fill in a dinner menu, and add the needed ingredients to the grocery list.
Make the rules simple: a different menu every night, and only one pasta dish per week.
Everyone's food issues (allergies, picky taste buds) must be addressed. Every menu must be healthy and include vegetables. Include a dish-duty sign-up, too.
Prepare sandwiches for dinner
When in doubt, whip up a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner to save time.
Make it with natural peanut butter, real fruit jam, and whole-grain bread. That way it's "real" food, unlike many of the additive-laden prepackaged meals so widely available now.
Keep an everything datebook
Buy a weekly calendar. Jot down all the traditional things: school events, birthdays, appointments.
But use it to keep track of nontraditional things, too.
Write down bills that come through the mail and mark their due dates six days ahead.
Plan weekly dinner menus and write them on the calendar. Use it to also record the kids' long-term assignments.
That helps prevent those evenings of racing around to do everything at the last second. RealSimple.com: Systems for managing your mail
Never miss another birthday
Send out birthday cards once a month. Receiving one early is better than not receiving one at all.
Have a shredder ready
Stow a small paper shredder near the mail to destroy credit-card offers and "checks."
Try a double-duty dustbin
Empty your bathroom garbage can and use it as a bucket when you wash your bathroom and hardwood floors.
Rinse it in the tub, then fill it with white vinegar and water. Both the floors and the garbage can are clean when you're done.
Start a recipe chain letter
Planning menus and getting the ingredients together for a quick meal after work can be time-consuming.
That's where the recipe-exchange "chain letter" comes in. Have friends send you their favorite easy-to-make recipes, then you forward them on.
In addition, keep a few cookbooks at the office and download recipes from the Internet to a folder on the computer.
Photocopy or print out the ingredients list while at work and then buy groceries during lunch or on the way home.
Squeeze now, use later
If you have leftover lemons and limes from a cocktail party, squeeze them and freeze the juice in an ice-cube tray.
Once they're frozen, store the cubes in zippered plastic bags and use them for recipes that call for fresh lemon or lime juice. (One cube equals about one tablespoon of juice.)
Keep an ongoing shopping list
Whoever unwraps the last bar of soap from the four-pack or scrapes the last spoonful of mayo out of the jar should be responsible for writing it down on the shopping list.
Time-stamp your photos
When you get your photographs developed, label the envelopes before leaving the store.
On the top of the envelope, jot down the date, subjects, or activity. It's easier than trying to remember the details later.
Or take it one step further and throw out right there in the store any flattering, uninteresting, or unclear photographs.
Get ready for morning the night before
Set out everything you can -- dry breakfast ingredients, clothes, backpacks and bags, and lunches -- before going to bed.
It means fewer things to think about when you wake up and you're getting ready to leave the house.
Create a beauty station
Hang a mirror by the door, along with a basket filled with last-minute primping tools.
You won't have to run all over the house looking for brushes, barrettes, sunscreen, hand lotion, or various makeup essentials: It's all in the basket.
Start a day-by-day shelf system
To get out the door more quickly each day, dedicate baskets or shelves to specific days of the week.
When you remove things from your bag at night, place each item on the appropriate shelf or in the correct basket.
Designate a certain spot for everyday items like your wallet, transit card, and cell phone.
Organize your hand-me-downs
Keep a "future bin" in the kids' closets for hand-me-downs you get from others and anything that's too big for them right now.
Purge their closets once a season. Put removed items in one of three places: a younger sibling's "future bin", the charity bin, or the trash.
Many charities, such as Goodwill, call quarterly to let you know they will have a truck in the area, so you don't have to load your car and make an extra trip.
When they call, leave the bin out front for pickup, and they'll hang the receipt (for tax purposes) on your doorknob.
This is also a good time to get rid of any toys that the kids have outgrown.
The GOP's Extremist Dilemma E.J. Dionne Jr.
WasingtonPost Monday, August 3, 2009
Things are looking up for the Republicans, relatively speaking. President Obama's poll numbers have dipped, GOP recruitment for the 2010 elections is going better than expected, and the health-care battle has been rough on the Democrats.
On top of that, the surveys show Republicans now leading in this year's two major governor's races, in Virginia and New Jersey.
There's just one problem: The country still doesn't like Republicans.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week captured the public's mixed verdict. The headlines focused on growing doubts about Obama's health-care plan and the drop in his approval rating, from 60 percent in February to 53 percent now.
But the same poll found that while Democrats as a party had a net positive rating of five points (42 percent positive to 37 percent negative), the GOP faced a 13-point deficit. Only 28 percent rated the Republicans positively; 41 percent rated them negatively.
Perhaps this has something to do with how few positive things Republicans have to say. As a result, the party is being defined by extremist voices who have faced little push-back from its leaders.
The extremists include the "birthers" who, against all evidence, insist that Obama was not born in the United States and thus is ineligible to be president. These guys are so out there that party leaders and conservative commentators have started to disown them.
Race-baiting is no longer off-limits on some of the right-wing talk shows. Fox News's Glenn Beck, for example, declared that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."
Ethnicity has been an underlying issue in the debate around Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned whether she would be fair by repeatedly referring to her comment -- from which she backed away -- about the relative wisdom of a "wise Latina."
Rush Limbaugh was far less subtle when her comment first surfaced. "How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration?" he asked. "By hating white people -- or even saying you do, or that they're not good or put 'em down, whatever."
Some in the party are also entering never-never land in their attacks on the Democrats' health-care proposals. Last week, for example, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) claimed that the Republican approach to health care would be more pro-life because it "will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."
Foxx's ludicrous notion -- taking off in the right-wing blogosphere -- is that Section 1233 of the House health bill is an invitation to euthanasia.
It's nothing of the sort. It simply provides Medicare funding so seniors with life-threatening diseases can consult their doctors on advanced care and get "an explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title."
The harshness of the rhetorical salvos is feeding worries among some Republicans that the GOP is increasingly perceived as a right-wing, Southern regional party.
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio brought those concerns to the surface in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch in which he spoke of the role played by Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," said Voinovich, who is retiring next year. "It's the southerners." He added: "People hear them and say, 'These people, they're southerners. The party's being taken over by southerners.' "
Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana shot back, calling Voinovich "a moderate, really wishy-washy" in an interview with the Washington Times. But Vitter offered indirect support for Voinovich's claim when he said: "I'm on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values. There are a lot of us from the South who hold those value[s], which I think the party is supposed to be about."
In the short term, these tussles and rumblings may not matter much. The country is focused on judging what the Democrats are doing with the power they hold. The path that politics will take depends largely on the outcome of the health-care battle and the direction of the economy.
But to take advantage of the opportunities that might come their way, Republicans will have to make themselves an acceptable alternative. They have not done this yet. Facing down extremism and breaking out of the party's regional enclave would be good places to start.
ejdionne@washpost.com
Things are looking up for the Republicans, relatively speaking. President Obama's poll numbers have dipped, GOP recruitment for the 2010 elections is going better than expected, and the health-care battle has been rough on the Democrats.
On top of that, the surveys show Republicans now leading in this year's two major governor's races, in Virginia and New Jersey.
There's just one problem: The country still doesn't like Republicans.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week captured the public's mixed verdict. The headlines focused on growing doubts about Obama's health-care plan and the drop in his approval rating, from 60 percent in February to 53 percent now.
But the same poll found that while Democrats as a party had a net positive rating of five points (42 percent positive to 37 percent negative), the GOP faced a 13-point deficit. Only 28 percent rated the Republicans positively; 41 percent rated them negatively.
Perhaps this has something to do with how few positive things Republicans have to say. As a result, the party is being defined by extremist voices who have faced little push-back from its leaders.
The extremists include the "birthers" who, against all evidence, insist that Obama was not born in the United States and thus is ineligible to be president. These guys are so out there that party leaders and conservative commentators have started to disown them.
Race-baiting is no longer off-limits on some of the right-wing talk shows. Fox News's Glenn Beck, for example, declared that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."
Ethnicity has been an underlying issue in the debate around Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned whether she would be fair by repeatedly referring to her comment -- from which she backed away -- about the relative wisdom of a "wise Latina."
Rush Limbaugh was far less subtle when her comment first surfaced. "How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration?" he asked. "By hating white people -- or even saying you do, or that they're not good or put 'em down, whatever."
Some in the party are also entering never-never land in their attacks on the Democrats' health-care proposals. Last week, for example, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) claimed that the Republican approach to health care would be more pro-life because it "will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."
Foxx's ludicrous notion -- taking off in the right-wing blogosphere -- is that Section 1233 of the House health bill is an invitation to euthanasia.
It's nothing of the sort. It simply provides Medicare funding so seniors with life-threatening diseases can consult their doctors on advanced care and get "an explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title."
The harshness of the rhetorical salvos is feeding worries among some Republicans that the GOP is increasingly perceived as a right-wing, Southern regional party.
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio brought those concerns to the surface in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch in which he spoke of the role played by Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," said Voinovich, who is retiring next year. "It's the southerners." He added: "People hear them and say, 'These people, they're southerners. The party's being taken over by southerners.' "
Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana shot back, calling Voinovich "a moderate, really wishy-washy" in an interview with the Washington Times. But Vitter offered indirect support for Voinovich's claim when he said: "I'm on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values. There are a lot of us from the South who hold those value[s], which I think the party is supposed to be about."
In the short term, these tussles and rumblings may not matter much. The country is focused on judging what the Democrats are doing with the power they hold. The path that politics will take depends largely on the outcome of the health-care battle and the direction of the economy.
But to take advantage of the opportunities that might come their way, Republicans will have to make themselves an acceptable alternative. They have not done this yet. Facing down extremism and breaking out of the party's regional enclave would be good places to start.
ejdionne@washpost.com
10 Years Ago, an Omen No One Saw (except one ME!)
NY Times DAVID CARR
Ten years ago Sunday, on an island off an island off the coast of America, something impossibly glamorous took place. Partygoers took boats from Manhattan to the home of the Statue of Liberty to plop pashalike on pillows and blankets and munch on lamb chops while Macy Gray sang, their faces illuminated with multicolored Chinese lanterns and fireworks curated and narrated by George Plimpton.
“That was a silver-flanged fleur-de-lis,” said the voice, highly recognizable but disembodied by darkness.
This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney, decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown, fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, that would lead the national conversation.
It was all kicked off with the kind of lavish party that would seem unthinkable in the current context.
Sponsored liquor flowed, women teetered about on heels in deep grass, and the A-list guest list — Mr. Kissinger, please meet Miss um Ms. uh meet Madonna — was a testament to the power of the synergized word. Content was king and Ms. Brown was its queen.
“Now you’re not exactly the tired masses, the huddled masses, but then again, I’m an immigrant who toiled here on the Concorde,” she said to the crowd after being introduced by Queen Latifah. “But I just want to say, here’s to Lady Liberty tonight.”
Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff.
“It seems like that happened in the 18th century,” said Ms. Brown by phone last Friday.
Magazines are on pace to book little more than half of the advertising pages that the industry did 10 years ago, and dozens of longtime titles have disappeared. The last big magazine introduction — Portfolio at Condé Nast Publications — flamed out this spring after two years at a cost of more than $80 million. Now even Condé Nast Publications, the world headquarters of printed luxury, has brought in the bean counters from McKinsey with an eye toward further cuts. There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk.
I’m still ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party — old prerogatives die hard — so I was trapped on shore, covering it secondhand with a nose pressed up against the glass. But it is worth thinking about how this future, or lack of one, arrived so unforeseen.
Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end.
Peter Kaplan, the former editor of The New York Observer, attended the party and oversaw coverage of the event.
“Tina, for all the excellence of her antenna, was scratching the air, and like many of us, was unable to pull in the new signal,” he said. “She failed to see that it was probably already over and that there was something slightly hollow about that event.”
Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete.
“Most of the talk at the Talk party was about the party itself,” said Kurt Andersen, a novelist, radio host and founder of Spy magazine. “It was weird and interesting because you were sort of wandering around in the dark out there and bumping into people. There was a meta quality to the thing, a self-consciousness, that in retrospect was probably telling.”
At least Ms. Brown did not compose a rap ode to the new magazine. That fell to Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast publisher who managed to get a flock of advertisers to buy the hype and commit to the first four issues of a magazine they had never seen. After Talk closed, Mr. Big quit Manhattan media and moved to a farm in Vermont. Maybe he knew something we didn’t. (He did not return a call.)
“It was the end of something extraordinary, but none of us knew it at the time,” Ms. Brown says now. “What followed was a very turbulent odyssey, not just for me, but for all of us. There has been a volcanic realignment that none of us foresaw.”
After Talk closed early in 2002, Ms. Brown hosted a television show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana. Demonstrating a nimbleness that has characterized her entire career, she is now running The Daily Beast, a scrappy but promising digital media site owned by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.
She pays her writers, increasingly an exception these days, but there are no huge contracts or boat rides to sylvan lawns full of impossibly famous people. The Daily Beast has 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, and has kicked up some notice, but its opening party of a hundred or so took place at the very much land-locked Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. There was no Sarah Jessica Parker, no Robert De Niro and no Hugh Grant in attendance. There were a lot of bloggers instead.
Modern media success is enabled by brutal cost control and using hard, fast numbers to convince advertisers they will get a return for their spending. Once stalwart magazines like BusinessWeek are up for grabs and entire formerly lucrative categories have been wiped out. The magazine canard of associative glamour, of selling aspiration by the bucket-load with page after page of pricy merchandise, is all but dead but for a few exceptions.
Ms. Brown once wrote the book “Life as a Party” and on that night, it was.
“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com http://twitter.com/carr2n
Ten years ago Sunday, on an island off an island off the coast of America, something impossibly glamorous took place. Partygoers took boats from Manhattan to the home of the Statue of Liberty to plop pashalike on pillows and blankets and munch on lamb chops while Macy Gray sang, their faces illuminated with multicolored Chinese lanterns and fireworks curated and narrated by George Plimpton.
“That was a silver-flanged fleur-de-lis,” said the voice, highly recognizable but disembodied by darkness.
This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney, decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown, fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, that would lead the national conversation.
It was all kicked off with the kind of lavish party that would seem unthinkable in the current context.
Sponsored liquor flowed, women teetered about on heels in deep grass, and the A-list guest list — Mr. Kissinger, please meet Miss um Ms. uh meet Madonna — was a testament to the power of the synergized word. Content was king and Ms. Brown was its queen.
“Now you’re not exactly the tired masses, the huddled masses, but then again, I’m an immigrant who toiled here on the Concorde,” she said to the crowd after being introduced by Queen Latifah. “But I just want to say, here’s to Lady Liberty tonight.”
Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff.
“It seems like that happened in the 18th century,” said Ms. Brown by phone last Friday.
Magazines are on pace to book little more than half of the advertising pages that the industry did 10 years ago, and dozens of longtime titles have disappeared. The last big magazine introduction — Portfolio at Condé Nast Publications — flamed out this spring after two years at a cost of more than $80 million. Now even Condé Nast Publications, the world headquarters of printed luxury, has brought in the bean counters from McKinsey with an eye toward further cuts. There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk.
I’m still ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party — old prerogatives die hard — so I was trapped on shore, covering it secondhand with a nose pressed up against the glass. But it is worth thinking about how this future, or lack of one, arrived so unforeseen.
Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end.
Peter Kaplan, the former editor of The New York Observer, attended the party and oversaw coverage of the event.
“Tina, for all the excellence of her antenna, was scratching the air, and like many of us, was unable to pull in the new signal,” he said. “She failed to see that it was probably already over and that there was something slightly hollow about that event.”
Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete.
“Most of the talk at the Talk party was about the party itself,” said Kurt Andersen, a novelist, radio host and founder of Spy magazine. “It was weird and interesting because you were sort of wandering around in the dark out there and bumping into people. There was a meta quality to the thing, a self-consciousness, that in retrospect was probably telling.”
At least Ms. Brown did not compose a rap ode to the new magazine. That fell to Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast publisher who managed to get a flock of advertisers to buy the hype and commit to the first four issues of a magazine they had never seen. After Talk closed, Mr. Big quit Manhattan media and moved to a farm in Vermont. Maybe he knew something we didn’t. (He did not return a call.)
“It was the end of something extraordinary, but none of us knew it at the time,” Ms. Brown says now. “What followed was a very turbulent odyssey, not just for me, but for all of us. There has been a volcanic realignment that none of us foresaw.”
After Talk closed early in 2002, Ms. Brown hosted a television show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana. Demonstrating a nimbleness that has characterized her entire career, she is now running The Daily Beast, a scrappy but promising digital media site owned by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.
She pays her writers, increasingly an exception these days, but there are no huge contracts or boat rides to sylvan lawns full of impossibly famous people. The Daily Beast has 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, and has kicked up some notice, but its opening party of a hundred or so took place at the very much land-locked Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. There was no Sarah Jessica Parker, no Robert De Niro and no Hugh Grant in attendance. There were a lot of bloggers instead.
Modern media success is enabled by brutal cost control and using hard, fast numbers to convince advertisers they will get a return for their spending. Once stalwart magazines like BusinessWeek are up for grabs and entire formerly lucrative categories have been wiped out. The magazine canard of associative glamour, of selling aspiration by the bucket-load with page after page of pricy merchandise, is all but dead but for a few exceptions.
Ms. Brown once wrote the book “Life as a Party” and on that night, it was.
“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com http://twitter.com/carr2n
Car Sales Rise in July, Helped by Rebates for ‘Clunkers’
Ford Sales Rise in July, Helped by Rebates for ‘Clunkers’
NY Times NICK BUNKLEY
DETROIT — The government’s “cash for clunkers” program gave automakers a desperately needed sales boost in July, though their relief could be short-lived if the Senate does not vote to extend the trade-in program after it unexpectedly ran out of money.
The Ford Motor Company said Monday that its United States sales rose 2.3 percent last month, marking the first year-over-year increase for any of the six largest carmakers since last August. Ford had not posted a monthly sales increase in nearly two years.
Ford, which heavily promoted the government-sponsored rebate program at its dealerships, in television ads and on its Web site, sold 18 percent more cars and crossover vehicles than it did in July 2008, though sales of its trucks and sport utility vehicles fell 18 percent. The company did not say how many of its sales were made to people who turned in a vehicle to be scrapped under the program.
“We had another strong month in progress before the ‘cash for clunkers’ program started,” Ken Czubay, Ford’s vice president for marketing, sales and service in the United States, said in a statement. “Our products, our dealers and our advance preparation enabled us to leverage the program and drive traffic and sales to another level. In addition, we achieved a sales increase even though we decreased incentive spending in an increasingly competitive environment.”
Other carmakers, including General Motors, Chrysler and Toyota, are scheduled to report their July sales later Monday.
The government trade-in program, which began July 24, lets consumers give up an older, inefficient vehicle and receive a credit of up to $4,500 toward the purchase of a new vehicle with a higher fuel economy rating. Its unexpected popularity caused the program, formally known as the Car Allowance Rebate System, to quickly exhaust its initial budget of $1 billion, which was enough for about 200,000 people to take part.
The House of Representatives voted Friday to provide $2 billion more, and approval from the Senate is needed to extend the program. Many dealers are now unsure whether to continue taking trade-ins under the program, not knowing if the government will reimburse them.
Automakers welcomed the program at a time when high unemployment and low consumer confidence levels have pushed new-vehicle sales to their lowest level since the recession of the early 1980’s. Through the first half of this year, sales were down 35 percent compared to the first half of 2008.
The Transportation Department said Monday afternoon that based on 80,500 cash-for-clunker applications — which officials believe is about a third of the total deals so far — average fuel economy of the new vehicles was 9.6 miles per gallon better than the old ones, 25.4 m.p.g. versus 15.8 m.p.g., an improvement of 60.8 percent. The improvement, the department pointed out, is much larger than the minimum required to be eligible for the government rebate: a gain of 4 miles per gallon for cars and 2 miles per gallon for trucks.
Part of the reason for the gain was that some people were turning in old trucks for new cars. So far, 83 percent of the “clunkers” were trucks or S.U.V.’s and 60 percent of the new vehicles were cars, the department said.
The department also said that Ford, General Motors and Chrysler supplied 47 percent of the new vehicles, slightly more than their overall share of the market, which is 45 percent. The top-selling new vehicle bought with the help of the rebate was the Ford Focus, and three more of the top 10 were also made by American companies, the department said. Of the remainder, it said, “preliminary analysis suggests that well over half of these new vehicles were manufactured in the United States.”
NY Times NICK BUNKLEY
DETROIT — The government’s “cash for clunkers” program gave automakers a desperately needed sales boost in July, though their relief could be short-lived if the Senate does not vote to extend the trade-in program after it unexpectedly ran out of money.
The Ford Motor Company said Monday that its United States sales rose 2.3 percent last month, marking the first year-over-year increase for any of the six largest carmakers since last August. Ford had not posted a monthly sales increase in nearly two years.
Ford, which heavily promoted the government-sponsored rebate program at its dealerships, in television ads and on its Web site, sold 18 percent more cars and crossover vehicles than it did in July 2008, though sales of its trucks and sport utility vehicles fell 18 percent. The company did not say how many of its sales were made to people who turned in a vehicle to be scrapped under the program.
“We had another strong month in progress before the ‘cash for clunkers’ program started,” Ken Czubay, Ford’s vice president for marketing, sales and service in the United States, said in a statement. “Our products, our dealers and our advance preparation enabled us to leverage the program and drive traffic and sales to another level. In addition, we achieved a sales increase even though we decreased incentive spending in an increasingly competitive environment.”
Other carmakers, including General Motors, Chrysler and Toyota, are scheduled to report their July sales later Monday.
The government trade-in program, which began July 24, lets consumers give up an older, inefficient vehicle and receive a credit of up to $4,500 toward the purchase of a new vehicle with a higher fuel economy rating. Its unexpected popularity caused the program, formally known as the Car Allowance Rebate System, to quickly exhaust its initial budget of $1 billion, which was enough for about 200,000 people to take part.
The House of Representatives voted Friday to provide $2 billion more, and approval from the Senate is needed to extend the program. Many dealers are now unsure whether to continue taking trade-ins under the program, not knowing if the government will reimburse them.
Automakers welcomed the program at a time when high unemployment and low consumer confidence levels have pushed new-vehicle sales to their lowest level since the recession of the early 1980’s. Through the first half of this year, sales were down 35 percent compared to the first half of 2008.
The Transportation Department said Monday afternoon that based on 80,500 cash-for-clunker applications — which officials believe is about a third of the total deals so far — average fuel economy of the new vehicles was 9.6 miles per gallon better than the old ones, 25.4 m.p.g. versus 15.8 m.p.g., an improvement of 60.8 percent. The improvement, the department pointed out, is much larger than the minimum required to be eligible for the government rebate: a gain of 4 miles per gallon for cars and 2 miles per gallon for trucks.
Part of the reason for the gain was that some people were turning in old trucks for new cars. So far, 83 percent of the “clunkers” were trucks or S.U.V.’s and 60 percent of the new vehicles were cars, the department said.
The department also said that Ford, General Motors and Chrysler supplied 47 percent of the new vehicles, slightly more than their overall share of the market, which is 45 percent. The top-selling new vehicle bought with the help of the rebate was the Ford Focus, and three more of the top 10 were also made by American companies, the department said. Of the remainder, it said, “preliminary analysis suggests that well over half of these new vehicles were manufactured in the United States.”
Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud
NY Times By BRIAN STELTER
It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.
It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.
At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.
Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.
In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).
“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.
The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.
“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”
The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation.
Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal,” adding that he would not have been included in any conversations between G.E. and the News Corporation. Fox News said it would not comment.
Civility was not always the aim of Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, men who, in an industry of thin skins, are both famous for reacting to verbal pinpricks. Both host 8 p.m. programs on cable news in studios a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan.
The conservative-leaning Mr. O’Reilly has turned “The O’Reilly Factor” into a profit center for the News Corporation by blitzing his opponents and espousing his opinions unapologetically. He found his bête noire in the liberal-leaning Mr. Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” who saw in Mr. O’Reilly a regenerating target he nicknamed the “Bill-o the Clown.”
The 6-foot-4 Mr. Olbermann started sniping regularly at the also 6-foot-4 Mr. O’Reilly in late 2005, sometimes making him the subject of the “Countdown” segment, the “Worst Person in the World.” Mr. O’Reilly was also a stand-in for the perceived offenses of the top-rated Fox News.
By punching up at his higher-rated prey, Mr. Olbermann helped his own third-place cable news show. “Honestly, I should send him a check each week,” he remarked to a reporter three years ago. Fox noticed. Mr. Murdoch remarked to Esquire last year that “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly.” Mr. O’Reilly refused to mention his critic by name on the “Factor,” deeming him a “vicious smear merchant,” but he regularly blamed Mr. Zucker for “ruining a once-great brand,” NBC.
In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.
Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt.” The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers was scathing.
The messages hit nerves on both sides. Mr. Immelt remarked to MSNBC staff members last summer that he would “never forgive Rupert Murdoch” for Fox’s behavior, according to two people who were present. In private phone calls, the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, told NBC officials to end the attacks.
In February, Mr. Zucker told Newsweek what he had told Mr. Olbermann privately: “I wish it weren’t so personal.” The previous year, Mr. Murdoch said that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t be so sensitive” to the attacks lobbed by MSNBC.
Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.
But like any title fight, the final round could not end without an attempted knockout. On June 1, the day after the abortion provider George Tiller was killed in Kansas, Mr. Olbermann took to the air to cite Mr. O’Reilly’s numerous references to “Tiller, the baby killer” and to announce that he would retire his caricature of Mr. O’Reilly.
“The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air,” he said.
The next day, Mr. O’Reilly made the extraordinary claim that “federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business” and published Mr. Immelt’s e-mail address and mailing address, repeating it slowly for emphasis.
Then the attacks mostly stopped.
Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E.
The executives at both companies, it appears, were relieved. “For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side,” one employee said.
Tensions still simmer between the two networks, however, and staff members have been unwilling or unable to stop the strife altogether. This week, for instance, the Fox host Glenn Beck called Mr. Obama a racist, prompting rebukes on a number of MSNBC shows. But for now, the daily back and forth has quieted.
“They’ve won their respective constituencies,” said a former member of MSNBC’s senior staff. “They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.
It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.
At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.
Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.
In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).
“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.
The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.
“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”
The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation.
Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal,” adding that he would not have been included in any conversations between G.E. and the News Corporation. Fox News said it would not comment.
Civility was not always the aim of Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, men who, in an industry of thin skins, are both famous for reacting to verbal pinpricks. Both host 8 p.m. programs on cable news in studios a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan.
The conservative-leaning Mr. O’Reilly has turned “The O’Reilly Factor” into a profit center for the News Corporation by blitzing his opponents and espousing his opinions unapologetically. He found his bête noire in the liberal-leaning Mr. Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” who saw in Mr. O’Reilly a regenerating target he nicknamed the “Bill-o the Clown.”
The 6-foot-4 Mr. Olbermann started sniping regularly at the also 6-foot-4 Mr. O’Reilly in late 2005, sometimes making him the subject of the “Countdown” segment, the “Worst Person in the World.” Mr. O’Reilly was also a stand-in for the perceived offenses of the top-rated Fox News.
By punching up at his higher-rated prey, Mr. Olbermann helped his own third-place cable news show. “Honestly, I should send him a check each week,” he remarked to a reporter three years ago. Fox noticed. Mr. Murdoch remarked to Esquire last year that “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly.” Mr. O’Reilly refused to mention his critic by name on the “Factor,” deeming him a “vicious smear merchant,” but he regularly blamed Mr. Zucker for “ruining a once-great brand,” NBC.
In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.
Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt.” The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers was scathing.
The messages hit nerves on both sides. Mr. Immelt remarked to MSNBC staff members last summer that he would “never forgive Rupert Murdoch” for Fox’s behavior, according to two people who were present. In private phone calls, the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, told NBC officials to end the attacks.
In February, Mr. Zucker told Newsweek what he had told Mr. Olbermann privately: “I wish it weren’t so personal.” The previous year, Mr. Murdoch said that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t be so sensitive” to the attacks lobbed by MSNBC.
Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch.
But like any title fight, the final round could not end without an attempted knockout. On June 1, the day after the abortion provider George Tiller was killed in Kansas, Mr. Olbermann took to the air to cite Mr. O’Reilly’s numerous references to “Tiller, the baby killer” and to announce that he would retire his caricature of Mr. O’Reilly.
“The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air,” he said.
The next day, Mr. O’Reilly made the extraordinary claim that “federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business” and published Mr. Immelt’s e-mail address and mailing address, repeating it slowly for emphasis.
Then the attacks mostly stopped.
Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E.
The executives at both companies, it appears, were relieved. “For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side,” one employee said.
Tensions still simmer between the two networks, however, and staff members have been unwilling or unable to stop the strife altogether. This week, for instance, the Fox host Glenn Beck called Mr. Obama a racist, prompting rebukes on a number of MSNBC shows. But for now, the daily back and forth has quieted.
“They’ve won their respective constituencies,” said a former member of MSNBC’s senior staff. “They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
David Sirota News In the Olbermann-O'Reilly Feud
The Real -- And Most Disturbing -- News In the Olbermann-O'Reilly Feud
The New York Times story about MSNBC's corporate parent, General Electric, forcing the network to soften its criticism of Fox News has generated a lot of buzz over the weekend. But what's so telling about the story and the residual chatter is that, with the exception of Glenn Greenwald's typically terrific coverage, it largely misses the newsiest -- and most taboo -- part of the whole brouhaha.
What the Times story and the aftershock gossip focuses on is the personality feud and new detente between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. That's supposedly the "news." And yet the real story is the heavy-handed intervention by the CEO of General Electric effectively forcing MSNBC's news team off a crucially important set of stories -- namely, Fox News' politicization/Republicanization of media.
For years, Establishment media voices like Charlie Rose (yes, the same Charlie Rose who the Times story says played a direct role in the corporate parents' intervention at MSNBC and Fox) have insisted that it's a black-helicopter-style conspiracy theory to assert that corporate parent companies pressure/impact/limit the newsrooms they control.
But, of course, the evidence has become overwhelming in the last 15 years.
The three most obvious that come to mind are:
1995: CBS' 60 Minutes backs off it's expose of the tobacco industry, due, in part, to pressure from its parent company and the tobacco industry. This sordid affair was made famous by the movie The Insider.
2001: NBC's president engages in direct political lobbying against a government order that would force NBC's parent company, General Electric, to clean up its mess in the Hudson River. At the same time, environmentalists noted that NBC did not give the Hudson River cleanup story nearly enough attention.
2009: The Washington Post's parent company offers corporations and their lobbyists "off-the-record access" to its reporters and editors in exchange for direct financial contributions of up to250,000.
This, of course, says nothing of the even more nefarious and arguably more widespread practice of these same corporate media outlets promoting as "objective" voices reporters and editorialists* who have secret financial interests in the news they cover -- all without any disclosure. Just a few examples:
Richard Wolffe: This former Newsweek reporter is now a paid corporate PR consultant. Yet, he appears on MSNBC as a disinterested "political analyst," even hosting Olbermann's show. Wolffe, in fact, publicly sells his media prominence on MSNBC as a reason for corporations to hire him. The implicit suggestion is that the corporate client will be able to buy a spokesman who gets to go on television without disclosing his financial interests - that is, Wolffe offers the corporate client the veneer of non-partisan objectivity. I flagged this ugly situation a week ago, and think I was the first to even notice it, despite how blatant a conflict of interest it is. The fact that it has gone on for so many months without anyone -- much less MSNBC's management -- questioning it shows just how mundane this kind of thing is.
Doug Bandow: In 2005, Businessweek reported that this senior fellow at the Cato Institute "resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients." Specifically, Bandow "had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."
Armstrong Williams: In 2005, this syndicated radio host and columnist took a quarter million dollars from the Education Department to promote President Bush's controversial education policy "on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same," according to USA Today.
Thomas Friedman: This New York Times columnist has become the single most prominent media voice in support of the multinational corporate agenda and the ultra-wealthy - and his credibility is based on the perception that Friedman is a completely disinterested commentator. However, Friedman -- by marriage -- is a member of the Bucksbaum empire, one of the biggest real estate conglomerates in the world.
Former Generals: David Barstow of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for "reveal[ing] how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended."
A corporate media apologist might try to argue that both the latter and former sets of examples are just the very rare egregious examples and further, that in the case of Wolffe and Friedman, there's no direct corporate control/conflict-of-interest because they don't report on the companies they directly work for. But that's actually the bigger point: A newsroom or an individual reporter doesn't have to be directly shilling for their financial interest in order to be unduly compromised.
Sure, examples like CBS's corporate management backing off 60 Minutes on the tobacco story and General Electric heavy-handedly intervening in MSNBC's news decisions are probably somewhat rare. And sure, Wolffe and Friedman (at least to my knowledge) never shilled directly for a client/business interest they were making money off of. However, the direct connect/interest undoubtedly shapes their content by the silent processes of story selection, omission and tone.
For every blatant example of a newsroom or a journalist brazenly shilling for their corporate master's bottom line, there are infinite examples of those newsrooms or journalists avoiding or omitting stories that might offend those masters' in the first place. Is it, for instance, really just a coincidence that the frightening effects of corporate agriculture have rarely been the topic of all those Sunday "news" shows whose sponsor are Archer Daniels Midland? Is it really just a coincidence that Friedman shills for corporations and the wealthy, when he is member of a billionaire family? Is it really just a coincidence that a newspaper like the Washington Post, which was trying to effectively sell its news coverage to corporate interests, generates stories that tend to be particularly soft on corporations and chock full of unchallenged corporate PR?
The list of examples is endless -- and the obvious answer is that none of it is a coincidence, even if most of these conflicts are kept completely hidden from the news-consuming audience.
But, then, the deception -- and the ubiquity of the deception -- is a big part of the corruption that is destroying journalism. Indeed, the fact that the Olbermann-O'Reilly personality feud was presented as the "big" story -- and not the General Electric intervention -- is a tacit confirmation that corporate-media symbiosis has become such an assumed part of journalism, that many journalists themselves don't see it as any kind of problem, much less news.
Of course, there are certainly some who do. The New York Times' David Barstow did when he reported on the financial interests of former generals appearing on television. Rachel Maddow did when she went out of her way to inform viewers that a supposedly disinterested guest she had on the night before was actually on the board of a corporation the guest was effectively shilling for. And most leading bloggers -- as opposed to most leading journalists who criticize bloggers' ethics -- go out of their way to disclose to readers their personal/financial connections to the news stories they are covering. Those, however, are the exceptions, not the rule.
The victims of this increasingly corrupt media system are both the viewers who are unknowingly fed a steady diet of stealth propaganda, and those trying to build truly independent media. I can personally attest to the latter.
As an independent journalist, I have gone out of my way to avoid financial/personal conflicts of interest, at considerable financial cost to me and my family. That means, for example, turning down various job/client opportunities (even for political groups I agree with), even when money is tight in a recession.
I'm not complaining -- I am proud of my independence and I can sleep at night knowing my credibility isn't compromised. However, now that the media ecosphere no longer demands, incentivizes or rewards that kind of independence, that decision to be independent has become purely a decision of personal virtue -- not industry mandate. It therefore puts me at a financial/competitive disadvantage in the economy at large.
Like other journalists and outlets who work to protect their credibility, I am sacrificing job/income opportunities in order to preserve my journalistic independence in a journalism industry that doesn't even pretend to insist on that independence. Quite the contrary, you can be Richard Wolffe and openly get paid by corporations and not risk your place on MSNBC or your billing as a supposed disinterested "political analyst." The result is a truly corrupt incentive system: the economic incentive now for the average journalist isn't to protect one's independence by avoiding financial conflicts of interest -- but to sell out knowing there probably won't be any ramifications for one's journalism career.
Will this ever change? Well, it's hard to know. But I can say this: You can bet that until we build a vibrant independent media and until the news consumers use their economic/audience power to demand more independence (or at least disclosure) from the corporate media, the rule will continue.
* Note: I know that editorialists/opinionists/commentators aren't "objective" in the sense that yes, of course, they have subjective opinions because that's their stated job. But the expectations of professional editorialists/opinionists/commentators is that their opinions are ideologically motivated -- not motivated out of a desire to protect their own undisclosed financial interests. So, when I use "objective" when referring to editorialists/opinionists/commentators, I am referring specifically to that kind of personal financial objectivity.
The New York Times story about MSNBC's corporate parent, General Electric, forcing the network to soften its criticism of Fox News has generated a lot of buzz over the weekend. But what's so telling about the story and the residual chatter is that, with the exception of Glenn Greenwald's typically terrific coverage, it largely misses the newsiest -- and most taboo -- part of the whole brouhaha.
What the Times story and the aftershock gossip focuses on is the personality feud and new detente between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. That's supposedly the "news." And yet the real story is the heavy-handed intervention by the CEO of General Electric effectively forcing MSNBC's news team off a crucially important set of stories -- namely, Fox News' politicization/Republicanization of media.
For years, Establishment media voices like Charlie Rose (yes, the same Charlie Rose who the Times story says played a direct role in the corporate parents' intervention at MSNBC and Fox) have insisted that it's a black-helicopter-style conspiracy theory to assert that corporate parent companies pressure/impact/limit the newsrooms they control.
But, of course, the evidence has become overwhelming in the last 15 years.
The three most obvious that come to mind are:
1995: CBS' 60 Minutes backs off it's expose of the tobacco industry, due, in part, to pressure from its parent company and the tobacco industry. This sordid affair was made famous by the movie The Insider.
2001: NBC's president engages in direct political lobbying against a government order that would force NBC's parent company, General Electric, to clean up its mess in the Hudson River. At the same time, environmentalists noted that NBC did not give the Hudson River cleanup story nearly enough attention.
2009: The Washington Post's parent company offers corporations and their lobbyists "off-the-record access" to its reporters and editors in exchange for direct financial contributions of up to250,000.
This, of course, says nothing of the even more nefarious and arguably more widespread practice of these same corporate media outlets promoting as "objective" voices reporters and editorialists* who have secret financial interests in the news they cover -- all without any disclosure. Just a few examples:
Richard Wolffe: This former Newsweek reporter is now a paid corporate PR consultant. Yet, he appears on MSNBC as a disinterested "political analyst," even hosting Olbermann's show. Wolffe, in fact, publicly sells his media prominence on MSNBC as a reason for corporations to hire him. The implicit suggestion is that the corporate client will be able to buy a spokesman who gets to go on television without disclosing his financial interests - that is, Wolffe offers the corporate client the veneer of non-partisan objectivity. I flagged this ugly situation a week ago, and think I was the first to even notice it, despite how blatant a conflict of interest it is. The fact that it has gone on for so many months without anyone -- much less MSNBC's management -- questioning it shows just how mundane this kind of thing is.
Doug Bandow: In 2005, Businessweek reported that this senior fellow at the Cato Institute "resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients." Specifically, Bandow "had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."
Armstrong Williams: In 2005, this syndicated radio host and columnist took a quarter million dollars from the Education Department to promote President Bush's controversial education policy "on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same," according to USA Today.
Thomas Friedman: This New York Times columnist has become the single most prominent media voice in support of the multinational corporate agenda and the ultra-wealthy - and his credibility is based on the perception that Friedman is a completely disinterested commentator. However, Friedman -- by marriage -- is a member of the Bucksbaum empire, one of the biggest real estate conglomerates in the world.
Former Generals: David Barstow of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for "reveal[ing] how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended."
A corporate media apologist might try to argue that both the latter and former sets of examples are just the very rare egregious examples and further, that in the case of Wolffe and Friedman, there's no direct corporate control/conflict-of-interest because they don't report on the companies they directly work for. But that's actually the bigger point: A newsroom or an individual reporter doesn't have to be directly shilling for their financial interest in order to be unduly compromised.
Sure, examples like CBS's corporate management backing off 60 Minutes on the tobacco story and General Electric heavy-handedly intervening in MSNBC's news decisions are probably somewhat rare. And sure, Wolffe and Friedman (at least to my knowledge) never shilled directly for a client/business interest they were making money off of. However, the direct connect/interest undoubtedly shapes their content by the silent processes of story selection, omission and tone.
For every blatant example of a newsroom or a journalist brazenly shilling for their corporate master's bottom line, there are infinite examples of those newsrooms or journalists avoiding or omitting stories that might offend those masters' in the first place. Is it, for instance, really just a coincidence that the frightening effects of corporate agriculture have rarely been the topic of all those Sunday "news" shows whose sponsor are Archer Daniels Midland? Is it really just a coincidence that Friedman shills for corporations and the wealthy, when he is member of a billionaire family? Is it really just a coincidence that a newspaper like the Washington Post, which was trying to effectively sell its news coverage to corporate interests, generates stories that tend to be particularly soft on corporations and chock full of unchallenged corporate PR?
The list of examples is endless -- and the obvious answer is that none of it is a coincidence, even if most of these conflicts are kept completely hidden from the news-consuming audience.
But, then, the deception -- and the ubiquity of the deception -- is a big part of the corruption that is destroying journalism. Indeed, the fact that the Olbermann-O'Reilly personality feud was presented as the "big" story -- and not the General Electric intervention -- is a tacit confirmation that corporate-media symbiosis has become such an assumed part of journalism, that many journalists themselves don't see it as any kind of problem, much less news.
Of course, there are certainly some who do. The New York Times' David Barstow did when he reported on the financial interests of former generals appearing on television. Rachel Maddow did when she went out of her way to inform viewers that a supposedly disinterested guest she had on the night before was actually on the board of a corporation the guest was effectively shilling for. And most leading bloggers -- as opposed to most leading journalists who criticize bloggers' ethics -- go out of their way to disclose to readers their personal/financial connections to the news stories they are covering. Those, however, are the exceptions, not the rule.
The victims of this increasingly corrupt media system are both the viewers who are unknowingly fed a steady diet of stealth propaganda, and those trying to build truly independent media. I can personally attest to the latter.
As an independent journalist, I have gone out of my way to avoid financial/personal conflicts of interest, at considerable financial cost to me and my family. That means, for example, turning down various job/client opportunities (even for political groups I agree with), even when money is tight in a recession.
I'm not complaining -- I am proud of my independence and I can sleep at night knowing my credibility isn't compromised. However, now that the media ecosphere no longer demands, incentivizes or rewards that kind of independence, that decision to be independent has become purely a decision of personal virtue -- not industry mandate. It therefore puts me at a financial/competitive disadvantage in the economy at large.
Like other journalists and outlets who work to protect their credibility, I am sacrificing job/income opportunities in order to preserve my journalistic independence in a journalism industry that doesn't even pretend to insist on that independence. Quite the contrary, you can be Richard Wolffe and openly get paid by corporations and not risk your place on MSNBC or your billing as a supposed disinterested "political analyst." The result is a truly corrupt incentive system: the economic incentive now for the average journalist isn't to protect one's independence by avoiding financial conflicts of interest -- but to sell out knowing there probably won't be any ramifications for one's journalism career.
Will this ever change? Well, it's hard to know. But I can say this: You can bet that until we build a vibrant independent media and until the news consumers use their economic/audience power to demand more independence (or at least disclosure) from the corporate media, the rule will continue.
* Note: I know that editorialists/opinionists/commentators aren't "objective" in the sense that yes, of course, they have subjective opinions because that's their stated job. But the expectations of professional editorialists/opinionists/commentators is that their opinions are ideologically motivated -- not motivated out of a desire to protect their own undisclosed financial interests. So, when I use "objective" when referring to editorialists/opinionists/commentators, I am referring specifically to that kind of personal financial objectivity.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
BOB HERBERT Anger Has Its Place
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.
The charge: angry while black.
The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.
I have nothing but contempt for that message.
Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.
The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.
You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.
That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.
It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.
New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.
But this country is not interested in that.
I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.
Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.
While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
FRANK RICH Small Beer, Big Hangover
THE comforting thing about each “national conversation on race” is that the “teachable moment” passes before any serious conversation can get going.
This one ended with a burp. The debate about which brew would best give President Obama Joe Six-Pack cred in his White House beer op with Harvard’s town-and-gown antagonists hit the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Had Obama picked a brand evoking an elitist whiff of John Kerry — Stella Artois, perhaps? — we’d have another week of coverage dissecting his biggest political gaffe since rolling a gutter ball at a Pennsylvania bowling alley.
You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs. Especially when this particular incident is truly small beer next to the far more traumatic national sea change on race that will keep sowing conflict and anger long after Henry Louis Gates Jr. finishes his proposed documentary on racial profiling.
I’ll return to the larger picture, but before the battle of Cambridge fades entirely, let’s note that the only crime Obama committed at his news conference was honesty (always impolitic in Washington). He conceded he did not know “all the facts” and so wisely resisted passing judgment on “what role race played” in the incident. He said, accurately, that “separate and apart from this incident” there is “a long history” of “African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately.” And, yes, the police did act “stupidly in arresting” — not to mention shackling — “somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” If Obama had really wanted to go for the jugular, he might have added that the police may have overstepped the law as well.
The president’s subsequent apology for his news-conference answer was superfluous. But he might have used it to acknowledge the one exemplary player in Cambridge, Lucia Whalen, the white passer-by whose good deed of a 911 phone call did not go unpunished. In his police report, Sgt. James Crowley portrayed Whalen as a racial profiler by saying she had told him that the two men at Gates’s door were black. She denied it, and the audio tape of her original call backs her up: she had told the dispatcher (only when asked) that one of the men “looked kind of Hispanic” and that she couldn’t see the other. Yet Whalen, who was pilloried as a racist because of Crowley’s report, received no apology from him and no White House invitation from Obama. That’s stupid behavior by both men.
It’s also stupid to look at Harvard as a paradigm of anything, race included. If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.
Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust — we don’t know that Crowley is a racist — but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.
What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.
What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.
Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.
It’s against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre “birther” movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.
Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.
Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter have condemned the birther brigades and likened them to “the truthers” who accused the Bush administration of engineering the 9/11 attacks. But those conspiracy theorists couldn’t find 11 congressmen willing to sponsor a bill supporting their claims. Even Liz Cheney has publicly refused to dispute the libels on Obama’s citizenship.
One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.
As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today’s variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates — Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.
Sometimes the most revealing expressions of this resentment emerge in juvenile asides — Bill Kristol (on The Weekly Standard’s blog) ridiculing Gates for writing a flowery travel magazine article about his privileged vacation home of Martha’s Vineyard, or Heather MacDonald (in National Review) mocking Gates as a “limousine liberal” for his supposedly hypocritical admission that he has a “regular car service” and a “regular driver” to fetch him at the airport. Who does Henry Louis Gates Jr. think he is, William F. Buckley Jr.?
The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.
This one ended with a burp. The debate about which brew would best give President Obama Joe Six-Pack cred in his White House beer op with Harvard’s town-and-gown antagonists hit the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Had Obama picked a brand evoking an elitist whiff of John Kerry — Stella Artois, perhaps? — we’d have another week of coverage dissecting his biggest political gaffe since rolling a gutter ball at a Pennsylvania bowling alley.
You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs. Especially when this particular incident is truly small beer next to the far more traumatic national sea change on race that will keep sowing conflict and anger long after Henry Louis Gates Jr. finishes his proposed documentary on racial profiling.
I’ll return to the larger picture, but before the battle of Cambridge fades entirely, let’s note that the only crime Obama committed at his news conference was honesty (always impolitic in Washington). He conceded he did not know “all the facts” and so wisely resisted passing judgment on “what role race played” in the incident. He said, accurately, that “separate and apart from this incident” there is “a long history” of “African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately.” And, yes, the police did act “stupidly in arresting” — not to mention shackling — “somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” If Obama had really wanted to go for the jugular, he might have added that the police may have overstepped the law as well.
The president’s subsequent apology for his news-conference answer was superfluous. But he might have used it to acknowledge the one exemplary player in Cambridge, Lucia Whalen, the white passer-by whose good deed of a 911 phone call did not go unpunished. In his police report, Sgt. James Crowley portrayed Whalen as a racial profiler by saying she had told him that the two men at Gates’s door were black. She denied it, and the audio tape of her original call backs her up: she had told the dispatcher (only when asked) that one of the men “looked kind of Hispanic” and that she couldn’t see the other. Yet Whalen, who was pilloried as a racist because of Crowley’s report, received no apology from him and no White House invitation from Obama. That’s stupid behavior by both men.
It’s also stupid to look at Harvard as a paradigm of anything, race included. If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.
Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust — we don’t know that Crowley is a racist — but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.
What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.
What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.
Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.
It’s against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre “birther” movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.
Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.
Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter have condemned the birther brigades and likened them to “the truthers” who accused the Bush administration of engineering the 9/11 attacks. But those conspiracy theorists couldn’t find 11 congressmen willing to sponsor a bill supporting their claims. Even Liz Cheney has publicly refused to dispute the libels on Obama’s citizenship.
One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.
As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today’s variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates — Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.
Sometimes the most revealing expressions of this resentment emerge in juvenile asides — Bill Kristol (on The Weekly Standard’s blog) ridiculing Gates for writing a flowery travel magazine article about his privileged vacation home of Martha’s Vineyard, or Heather MacDonald (in National Review) mocking Gates as a “limousine liberal” for his supposedly hypocritical admission that he has a “regular car service” and a “regular driver” to fetch him at the airport. Who does Henry Louis Gates Jr. think he is, William F. Buckley Jr.?
The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
What's Stalling Health-Care Reform?
With health-care reform packages stalled as Congress leaves for August recess, The Post asked lawmakers and experts what the biggest obstacle to reform has been and how it might be overcome. Below are contributions from Raul M. Grijalva, Walt Minnick, Michael O. Leavitt, Rick Scott, Norman J. Ornstein, Douglas E. Schoen, Henry E. Simmons, Ralph G. Neas and Maxine Waters.
RAÚL M. GRIJALVA
Democratic representative from Arizona; co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
The greatest obstacle in this historic debate has been our underestimating the health-care industry's opposition to fundamental reform.
To many of us, the initial cornerstone of reform was a single-payer approach. Lack of political will took that off the table. The fallback was a meaningful public option, defined by stability of coverage, costs and quality. This affordable plan, with guaranteed access, would compete with the insurance companies. When the industry and its allies realized we would be prioritizing our nation's health over their egregious profits, they quickly painted "the government" as the enemy, and, though we recognized this opposition, we didn't take our case to the public. Convinced that Americans already understood the benefits of a robust public option, we decided to play an inside-the-Beltway game, and we started to lose the public relations war.
Nearly every American has a health-care horror story involving their insurance company. The public is fed up with our broken system. We can overcome our public relations slip-up if we help our constituents understand that the industry, not the government, is responsible for the ever-increasing rates and scaled-back coverage they receive.
WALT MINNICK
Democratic representative from Idaho; Blue Dog Coalition member
Most people agree on the most important points of health-care reform: We must reduce costs. We should not increase our deficit. All Americans should have secure, stable coverage. But a lack of public confidence in the congressional process has proven a massive obstacle. While it's true that members from both sides have worked together diligently, occasional public disputes have weakened public confidence in our ability to craft an effective plan.
That's unfortunate, because most members of Congress want bipartisan, collaborative consensus on reform. I am encouraged by the work of the Senate Finance Committee and Chairman Max Baucus, who understands what we in Western politics have learned the hard way: No one wins when everyone fights.
Whether it is natural resources, water, economic development or a major undertaking like health-care reform, the Western way is to bring people together, look for agreement and move toward a solution. That is happening in Congress, but it must be more visible to overcome the toughest obstacle of all in our effort to reform health care: Convincing Americans they can trust us to do this right.
MICHAEL O. LEAVITT
Secretary of health and human services from 2005 to 2009
Simply stated: Partisan overreach. The Democrats produced a bill that is simply over the top on federal government control and that includes more new taxes than our economy can stand. It is just too much Washington.
Many thought it was poor tactics that caused Hillarycare to flat-line in the 1990s. Most thought the organizers of Obamacare could avoid the same mistakes. But we are now learning that partisan overreach is hardwired into political parties when they are handed power after a decade in the wilderness. They simply cannot help themselves.
The Clinton health-care proposal overreached, and it cost Democrats control of Congress. You can argue that we Republicans did the same on welfare reform. We passed partisan bills; they were twice vetoed. Then we got down to bipartisan problem-solving. A decade later, both sides take satisfaction in the success.
This time around, the end won't arrive with a presidential veto. It will be average Americans attending town meetings to voice their outrage.
This nation desperately needs real reform. Once we weather the partisan overreach, one hopes we can get down to the business of designing what people want: a tax-neutral, deficit-neutral change that rewards value, not volume. It can happen, and it needs to happen. It is time.
RICK SCOTT
Chairman, Conservatives for Patients' Rights
Congress misunderstood what Americans want. In poll after poll, Americans have consistently said they want lower costs, not a government-run insurance company denying them treatments or drugs and giving them poor care. What has been proposed, however, is a massive power grab, in the form of the public insurance option.
Putting a national board to do comparative-effectiveness research in the stimulus bill scared everyone as to whether the government was setting itself up to deny care. Americans believe the focus should be on the economy and their jobs, not a government takeover of health care. Blue Dog Democrats sense the outrage and have wisely tried to kill the government-run insurance disaster.
There are many ways to reduce health-care costs that won't cost taxpayers a dime: Give the same tax breaks to everyone who buys insurance; standardize claims forms; require doctors and hospitals to post prices and outcomes; and reward people for eating right, exercising and not smoking. If Congress were to consider some of these, it might have an easier time passing reform.
NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN
Resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Look at three factors for the difficult path for health reform. First is the public: The universal public definition of health reform is, "I pay less." But the message when reform rubber hits the road is almost inevitably, "Watch out, you will pay more so others pay less."
Second is the dysfunction in our politics, which make broad bipartisan consensus so difficult unless there is an immediate, gut-churning crisis -- and even then, it is no sure thing. (Look at the unanimous House Republican opposition to the stimulus plan even as our economy was teetering at the edge of deflation and depression.) Achieving major social reform without bipartisan support is a very heavy lift. And without bipartisan leadership support, the public grows even more wary that their definition of reform will be violated.
Third is the sheer substantive difficulty of "fixing" deep-seated problems that spread over one-sixth of the economy, in a complex, intertwined system that is half public and half private.
Even so, there is a better-than-even chance that a serious, if not far-reaching, reform plan will get through this Congress. The need is deep enough, the president is savvy enough and the majority Democrats will be desperate enough to make something happen.
DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
Democratic pollster and author; adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000
The principal reason for gridlock is that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress have misread public opinion on health care. Voters want an overhaul, and they strongly believe that there needs to be an expansion of coverage. But there is far more concern about the size, scope and cost of the initiative than the Democrats have realized. There is also great concern about the level of taxation in America going forward. And there is deep fear that a government bureaucracy will supplant or interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. This fear has been exemplified this week by the notion that, somehow, the federal government will make life-and-death decisions but not pay for end-of-life-care.
There is every reason to believe, as evidenced in the recent survey data, that a 1994-type swing against the Democrats could materialize if their budget, health-care and cap-and-trade policies prove as expensive and unwieldy as many Americans fear. But polls also clearly suggest that the people will embrace a bipartisan agreement on health care that incrementally but inexorably expands coverage, controls costs and does not entail a public option.
Given the weakened position of the Republican Party, there is every reason to believe that any such compromise will benefit the Democrats. The Republicans' best hope is that continued gridlock on the health issue will further erode the president and the Democrats' standing and lead to a swing back to the GOP.
HENRY E. SIMMONS and RALPH G. NEAS
President and CEO, respectively, National Coalition on Health Care
Major legislative reform involves complicated policy choices and even more complex politics. Despite multiple obstacles, heroic efforts by congressional leaders and the administration have kept reform moving forward and positioned for enactment this year
However, we view the failure of lawmakers to effectively address slowing the increase in health-care costs to all payers -- not just the government -- as the greatest obstacle to reform. The failure to address systemwide cost containment was avoidable. Lawmakers only had to follow the Congressional Budget's Office's December road map on how to generate health-care savings in the short term, and today we would be closer to enactment of sustainable and systemwide reforms.
As a nation, we now must also make the tough choices necessary to ensure the health and economic well-being of future generations far beyond the proposed 10-year CBO budget horizon -- especially since the CBO's projections fail to attribute any savings to critical investments in prevention, disease management or wellness within that time frame. Several arduous months lie ahead; there is still time.
MAXINE WATERS
Democratic representative from California; member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
It's a familiar story: Special interests who benefit from the status quo are aggressively resisting reform. In this case, insurance companies, drug companies and other health-care industry organizations have blanketed the halls of Congress with well-paid lobbyists to protect their profits and kill a meaningful public option. The industry is also using its vast financial resources to run misleading ads, use scare tactics and fatten the campaign coffers of certain members of Congress.
As The Post reported, Blue Dogs "have set a record pace for fundraising this year . . . surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June, [more] than half the money [coming] from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries."
Republicans by and large never wanted health-care reform. Unfortunately, Blue Dogs -- a group of conservative Democrats who claim to want to reduce costs -- are also now serving as guard dogs for the insurers and drugmakers and increasing costs by insisting on higher pay for doctors in their communities.
Health-care industry resistance to change was predictable and could not have been avoided, but it can be overcome. Instead of spending more time negotiating with Blue Dogs, we must remind them that many of their districts include sizable constituencies that desperately need and truly want reform.
If push comes to shove, Senate Democrats can pass a good reform bill without Republicans, and progressives in the House will show leadership that we, too, are a force to be reckoned with.
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RAÚL M. GRIJALVA
Democratic representative from Arizona; co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
The greatest obstacle in this historic debate has been our underestimating the health-care industry's opposition to fundamental reform.
To many of us, the initial cornerstone of reform was a single-payer approach. Lack of political will took that off the table. The fallback was a meaningful public option, defined by stability of coverage, costs and quality. This affordable plan, with guaranteed access, would compete with the insurance companies. When the industry and its allies realized we would be prioritizing our nation's health over their egregious profits, they quickly painted "the government" as the enemy, and, though we recognized this opposition, we didn't take our case to the public. Convinced that Americans already understood the benefits of a robust public option, we decided to play an inside-the-Beltway game, and we started to lose the public relations war.
Nearly every American has a health-care horror story involving their insurance company. The public is fed up with our broken system. We can overcome our public relations slip-up if we help our constituents understand that the industry, not the government, is responsible for the ever-increasing rates and scaled-back coverage they receive.
WALT MINNICK
Democratic representative from Idaho; Blue Dog Coalition member
Most people agree on the most important points of health-care reform: We must reduce costs. We should not increase our deficit. All Americans should have secure, stable coverage. But a lack of public confidence in the congressional process has proven a massive obstacle. While it's true that members from both sides have worked together diligently, occasional public disputes have weakened public confidence in our ability to craft an effective plan.
That's unfortunate, because most members of Congress want bipartisan, collaborative consensus on reform. I am encouraged by the work of the Senate Finance Committee and Chairman Max Baucus, who understands what we in Western politics have learned the hard way: No one wins when everyone fights.
Whether it is natural resources, water, economic development or a major undertaking like health-care reform, the Western way is to bring people together, look for agreement and move toward a solution. That is happening in Congress, but it must be more visible to overcome the toughest obstacle of all in our effort to reform health care: Convincing Americans they can trust us to do this right.
MICHAEL O. LEAVITT
Secretary of health and human services from 2005 to 2009
Simply stated: Partisan overreach. The Democrats produced a bill that is simply over the top on federal government control and that includes more new taxes than our economy can stand. It is just too much Washington.
Many thought it was poor tactics that caused Hillarycare to flat-line in the 1990s. Most thought the organizers of Obamacare could avoid the same mistakes. But we are now learning that partisan overreach is hardwired into political parties when they are handed power after a decade in the wilderness. They simply cannot help themselves.
The Clinton health-care proposal overreached, and it cost Democrats control of Congress. You can argue that we Republicans did the same on welfare reform. We passed partisan bills; they were twice vetoed. Then we got down to bipartisan problem-solving. A decade later, both sides take satisfaction in the success.
This time around, the end won't arrive with a presidential veto. It will be average Americans attending town meetings to voice their outrage.
This nation desperately needs real reform. Once we weather the partisan overreach, one hopes we can get down to the business of designing what people want: a tax-neutral, deficit-neutral change that rewards value, not volume. It can happen, and it needs to happen. It is time.
RICK SCOTT
Chairman, Conservatives for Patients' Rights
Congress misunderstood what Americans want. In poll after poll, Americans have consistently said they want lower costs, not a government-run insurance company denying them treatments or drugs and giving them poor care. What has been proposed, however, is a massive power grab, in the form of the public insurance option.
Putting a national board to do comparative-effectiveness research in the stimulus bill scared everyone as to whether the government was setting itself up to deny care. Americans believe the focus should be on the economy and their jobs, not a government takeover of health care. Blue Dog Democrats sense the outrage and have wisely tried to kill the government-run insurance disaster.
There are many ways to reduce health-care costs that won't cost taxpayers a dime: Give the same tax breaks to everyone who buys insurance; standardize claims forms; require doctors and hospitals to post prices and outcomes; and reward people for eating right, exercising and not smoking. If Congress were to consider some of these, it might have an easier time passing reform.
NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN
Resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Look at three factors for the difficult path for health reform. First is the public: The universal public definition of health reform is, "I pay less." But the message when reform rubber hits the road is almost inevitably, "Watch out, you will pay more so others pay less."
Second is the dysfunction in our politics, which make broad bipartisan consensus so difficult unless there is an immediate, gut-churning crisis -- and even then, it is no sure thing. (Look at the unanimous House Republican opposition to the stimulus plan even as our economy was teetering at the edge of deflation and depression.) Achieving major social reform without bipartisan support is a very heavy lift. And without bipartisan leadership support, the public grows even more wary that their definition of reform will be violated.
Third is the sheer substantive difficulty of "fixing" deep-seated problems that spread over one-sixth of the economy, in a complex, intertwined system that is half public and half private.
Even so, there is a better-than-even chance that a serious, if not far-reaching, reform plan will get through this Congress. The need is deep enough, the president is savvy enough and the majority Democrats will be desperate enough to make something happen.
DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
Democratic pollster and author; adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000
The principal reason for gridlock is that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress have misread public opinion on health care. Voters want an overhaul, and they strongly believe that there needs to be an expansion of coverage. But there is far more concern about the size, scope and cost of the initiative than the Democrats have realized. There is also great concern about the level of taxation in America going forward. And there is deep fear that a government bureaucracy will supplant or interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. This fear has been exemplified this week by the notion that, somehow, the federal government will make life-and-death decisions but not pay for end-of-life-care.
There is every reason to believe, as evidenced in the recent survey data, that a 1994-type swing against the Democrats could materialize if their budget, health-care and cap-and-trade policies prove as expensive and unwieldy as many Americans fear. But polls also clearly suggest that the people will embrace a bipartisan agreement on health care that incrementally but inexorably expands coverage, controls costs and does not entail a public option.
Given the weakened position of the Republican Party, there is every reason to believe that any such compromise will benefit the Democrats. The Republicans' best hope is that continued gridlock on the health issue will further erode the president and the Democrats' standing and lead to a swing back to the GOP.
HENRY E. SIMMONS and RALPH G. NEAS
President and CEO, respectively, National Coalition on Health Care
Major legislative reform involves complicated policy choices and even more complex politics. Despite multiple obstacles, heroic efforts by congressional leaders and the administration have kept reform moving forward and positioned for enactment this year
However, we view the failure of lawmakers to effectively address slowing the increase in health-care costs to all payers -- not just the government -- as the greatest obstacle to reform. The failure to address systemwide cost containment was avoidable. Lawmakers only had to follow the Congressional Budget's Office's December road map on how to generate health-care savings in the short term, and today we would be closer to enactment of sustainable and systemwide reforms.
As a nation, we now must also make the tough choices necessary to ensure the health and economic well-being of future generations far beyond the proposed 10-year CBO budget horizon -- especially since the CBO's projections fail to attribute any savings to critical investments in prevention, disease management or wellness within that time frame. Several arduous months lie ahead; there is still time.
MAXINE WATERS
Democratic representative from California; member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
It's a familiar story: Special interests who benefit from the status quo are aggressively resisting reform. In this case, insurance companies, drug companies and other health-care industry organizations have blanketed the halls of Congress with well-paid lobbyists to protect their profits and kill a meaningful public option. The industry is also using its vast financial resources to run misleading ads, use scare tactics and fatten the campaign coffers of certain members of Congress.
As The Post reported, Blue Dogs "have set a record pace for fundraising this year . . . surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June, [more] than half the money [coming] from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries."
Republicans by and large never wanted health-care reform. Unfortunately, Blue Dogs -- a group of conservative Democrats who claim to want to reduce costs -- are also now serving as guard dogs for the insurers and drugmakers and increasing costs by insisting on higher pay for doctors in their communities.
Health-care industry resistance to change was predictable and could not have been avoided, but it can be overcome. Instead of spending more time negotiating with Blue Dogs, we must remind them that many of their districts include sizable constituencies that desperately need and truly want reform.
If push comes to shove, Senate Democrats can pass a good reform bill without Republicans, and progressives in the House will show leadership that we, too, are a force to be reckoned with.
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