WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.
These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.
What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.
We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.
This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.
That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.
This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.
But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.
The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.
Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”
If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.
The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.
It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”
No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
MEDIA MATTERS 'Week' on RIGHT WING WACKOS
Right-wing media and the fringe:
A growing history of violence (and denial)
6-12/09
This week, the country's attention was captured by the horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations. The fatal shooting came just two months after an April 7 Department of Homeland Security report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism.
As Media Matters for America documented, the DHS report was immediately and vehemently rejected by numerous conservative commentators, such as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and David Asman, who portrayed it as an illegitimate and politically motivated assault on conservatives. (Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch puts the attacks in even broader perspective here.)
Following the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, these commentators faced criticism for their earlier dismissiveness. Some have since unconvincingly (and in the case of Joe Scarborough, inaccurately) defended their past assessment, and a handful of reporters and analysts are still engaging in falsehoods and inconsistencies in criticizing the DHS report. But on Fox News, Shepard Smith took a different position -- for which he was attacked by conservatives -- saying that the report "was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right."
The day before the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert wrote that Fox News and its hosts "will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain." He added that "militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it's now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis." (He also appeared on CNN this week.)
While right-wing media are certainly not legally culpable for any recent attacks, they are responsible for promoting a culture of fear, paranoia, and violence that is anti-government in the extreme -- a culture in which extremists, including von Brunn and Richard Poplawski, who fatally shot three Pittsburgh police officers, were apparently immersed. Poplawski was convinced that the Obama administration was going to take away his guns. Even though no evidence of such a policy exists, right-wing commentators and news organizations made the claim repeatedly before the shooting and have continued to do so since.
Predictably, conservative media figures responded to the museum shooting by attempting to shift attention away from themselves and onto political liberals and even President Obama himself. On June 10, the day of the museum shooting, financial analyst and radio host Jim Lacamp said on Fox News that "we have an administration that's really done a lot of class warfare, a lot of class-baiting. And so, it sets the stage for social unrest." That same day, conservative Tammy Bruce wrote that the Obama administration's "increasing anti-Israel rhetoric and the pandering to the Jew-hating world Arab world ... encourages all the beasts among us." Newsmax.com published an op-ed, cited on Friday by Michael Savage, claiming that Obama "is most certainly creating a climate of hate against" Jews. Colorado radio host Bob Newman even raised questions about whether Obama's recent visit to a concentration camp, or his statement about Israeli settlements, were factors in the shooting.
But as always, the most virulent reality-denier was Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh claimed that von Brunn "is a leftist if anything." He said that Obama is "ramping up hatred for Israel" and that "anti-Jew rhetoric comes from the American left." He claimed that MSNBC broadcasts "hate 24/7." Despite the right wing's repeated use of violent, revolutionary rhetoric, Limbaugh said that it was actually Obama who "thrives and needs chaos" to succeed. And in response to Shepard Smith, he remarked that the "claim that the atmosphere is somehow more violently anti-Obama is simply preposterous."
Indeed, Smith's remarks were the exception for the right. Despite its love of fearmongering, Fox News spent the 24 hours after the von Brunn shooting downplaying it. And on his broadcast that night, Bill O'Reilly, who hypocritically and incorrectly criticized the media for a supposed lack of coverage after the shooting death of Army recruiter Pvt. William Long, and who stokes the anger of viewers whenever it suits him politically, barely mentioned the shooting and instead featured what he called a "very important story" on gay penguins. "Do they wear tight T-shirts?" he asked, laughing. During the two shows after the shooting, Hannity barely mentioned it.
Other major stories this week:
Newt in the news
This was a big week for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is clearly attempting to position himself as the new (aka, old) voice of the GOP. (And according to USA Today, he's in the running.)
Newt, who had previously backed off of referring to Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a "racist," began the week by modifying his argument and repeating the dubious claim that she "clearly supported racial quotas" in the Frank Ricci case.
He followed it up at a congressional Republican fundraiser by proudly declaring that he was "not a citizen of the world," saying that "the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous." CNN's Candy Crowley and CQ Politics' Jonathan Allen reported Gingrich's statement without noting that President Ronald Reagan made similar remarks while addressing the United Nations in 1982. (You would think that Gingrich, a former history teacher, would have known better.) After Media Matters documented the oversight, MSNBC's David Shuster and Keith Olbermann, as well as by NBC's Brian Williams, subjected Gingrich's remarks to scrutiny.
Newt closed the week by reacting to a Weekly Standard article discussing the ongoing U.S. practice of reading Miranda rights to detainees. On Fox News' Hannity, Gingrich said that it was "unimaginable. It's worse than anything Jimmy Carter ever did. It's worse than anything that President Bill Clinton ever did." In doing so, he ignored the part of the article reporting that the FBI also Mirandized people at "specific bases" during the Bush administration.
Newt's factually challenged analysis has come to be so legendary that even MSNBC's Mike Barnicle felt compelled to ask, "[W]hy would anyone pay attention to anything he says?" It's a good question. Perhaps it's because networks like Fox News do whatever they can to make Gingrich, who hasn't held any office or official position since 1998, relevant.
Health care reform is coming, and the news is already making me sick
All three national networks covered a Thursday town hall meeting that Obama held in Wisconsin, during which he laid out his health care proposals in detail. And yet, not one of them reported on the substance of his remarks, focusing instead on a note he wrote for a 10-year-old girl who was skipping school.
On Friday, NPR's Mara Liasson claimed that the American Medical Association opposes a public plan as a component of health care reform, even though the AMA had backtracked the same day, stating that it was "willing to consider other variations of a public plan that are currently under discussion in Congress." Flaws in a New York Times story the day before about the AMA's position were the subject of Media Matters Senior Fellow Jamison Foser's column this week.
And during a Wednesday interview with Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell freely editorialized, lecturing him on how current proposals seemingly would "drive the deficit into these stratospheric numbers" and complaining that senators were engaging in "gobbledygook" on the issue.
The need for accurate and impartial reporting on impending legislation is made all the more acute by the long history and prevalence of misinformation from media conservatives on the issue. On Thursday, Limbaugh began pulling out the stops, sounding not unlike O'Donnell in the process. "And it's all about control," he said. "It's not about cost. This man's not worried about the cost of anything. He doesn't care what anything costs: a trip to New York for a date -- $12 trillion in debt over 10 years? He doesn't care what things cost." He went on to hypothesize that "exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system" because they keep getting injured.
Buchanan continues to test how much MSNBC will tolerate
Media Matters has already documented Pat Buchanan's racially charged and often sexist campaign against Sotomayor. Despite his recent (and past) behavior, however, MSNBC has provided Buchanan with a prominent platform from which to spew his invective. This week, Foser asked a question MSNBC -- which in the past has had to fire Michael Savage and Don Imus for their remarks -- should answer: just what would Pat Buchanan have to say to be fired from the network?
Well, during this past week, Buchanan was curiously absent from much of MSNBC's commentary. Was it a sign that the network might be re-evaluating its relationship with one of its favorite "analysts"? If so, it should take note of the fact that Buchanan is set to host what the Southern Poverty Law Center called a "prominent white nationalist" at the upcoming conference of The American Cause, a Buchanan-led organization.
A growing history of violence (and denial)
6-12/09
This week, the country's attention was captured by the horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations. The fatal shooting came just two months after an April 7 Department of Homeland Security report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism.
As Media Matters for America documented, the DHS report was immediately and vehemently rejected by numerous conservative commentators, such as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and David Asman, who portrayed it as an illegitimate and politically motivated assault on conservatives. (Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch puts the attacks in even broader perspective here.)
Following the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, these commentators faced criticism for their earlier dismissiveness. Some have since unconvincingly (and in the case of Joe Scarborough, inaccurately) defended their past assessment, and a handful of reporters and analysts are still engaging in falsehoods and inconsistencies in criticizing the DHS report. But on Fox News, Shepard Smith took a different position -- for which he was attacked by conservatives -- saying that the report "was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right."
The day before the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert wrote that Fox News and its hosts "will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain." He added that "militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it's now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis." (He also appeared on CNN this week.)
While right-wing media are certainly not legally culpable for any recent attacks, they are responsible for promoting a culture of fear, paranoia, and violence that is anti-government in the extreme -- a culture in which extremists, including von Brunn and Richard Poplawski, who fatally shot three Pittsburgh police officers, were apparently immersed. Poplawski was convinced that the Obama administration was going to take away his guns. Even though no evidence of such a policy exists, right-wing commentators and news organizations made the claim repeatedly before the shooting and have continued to do so since.
Predictably, conservative media figures responded to the museum shooting by attempting to shift attention away from themselves and onto political liberals and even President Obama himself. On June 10, the day of the museum shooting, financial analyst and radio host Jim Lacamp said on Fox News that "we have an administration that's really done a lot of class warfare, a lot of class-baiting. And so, it sets the stage for social unrest." That same day, conservative Tammy Bruce wrote that the Obama administration's "increasing anti-Israel rhetoric and the pandering to the Jew-hating world Arab world ... encourages all the beasts among us." Newsmax.com published an op-ed, cited on Friday by Michael Savage, claiming that Obama "is most certainly creating a climate of hate against" Jews. Colorado radio host Bob Newman even raised questions about whether Obama's recent visit to a concentration camp, or his statement about Israeli settlements, were factors in the shooting.
But as always, the most virulent reality-denier was Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh claimed that von Brunn "is a leftist if anything." He said that Obama is "ramping up hatred for Israel" and that "anti-Jew rhetoric comes from the American left." He claimed that MSNBC broadcasts "hate 24/7." Despite the right wing's repeated use of violent, revolutionary rhetoric, Limbaugh said that it was actually Obama who "thrives and needs chaos" to succeed. And in response to Shepard Smith, he remarked that the "claim that the atmosphere is somehow more violently anti-Obama is simply preposterous."
Indeed, Smith's remarks were the exception for the right. Despite its love of fearmongering, Fox News spent the 24 hours after the von Brunn shooting downplaying it. And on his broadcast that night, Bill O'Reilly, who hypocritically and incorrectly criticized the media for a supposed lack of coverage after the shooting death of Army recruiter Pvt. William Long, and who stokes the anger of viewers whenever it suits him politically, barely mentioned the shooting and instead featured what he called a "very important story" on gay penguins. "Do they wear tight T-shirts?" he asked, laughing. During the two shows after the shooting, Hannity barely mentioned it.
Other major stories this week:
Newt in the news
This was a big week for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is clearly attempting to position himself as the new (aka, old) voice of the GOP. (And according to USA Today, he's in the running.)
Newt, who had previously backed off of referring to Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a "racist," began the week by modifying his argument and repeating the dubious claim that she "clearly supported racial quotas" in the Frank Ricci case.
He followed it up at a congressional Republican fundraiser by proudly declaring that he was "not a citizen of the world," saying that "the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous." CNN's Candy Crowley and CQ Politics' Jonathan Allen reported Gingrich's statement without noting that President Ronald Reagan made similar remarks while addressing the United Nations in 1982. (You would think that Gingrich, a former history teacher, would have known better.) After Media Matters documented the oversight, MSNBC's David Shuster and Keith Olbermann, as well as by NBC's Brian Williams, subjected Gingrich's remarks to scrutiny.
Newt closed the week by reacting to a Weekly Standard article discussing the ongoing U.S. practice of reading Miranda rights to detainees. On Fox News' Hannity, Gingrich said that it was "unimaginable. It's worse than anything Jimmy Carter ever did. It's worse than anything that President Bill Clinton ever did." In doing so, he ignored the part of the article reporting that the FBI also Mirandized people at "specific bases" during the Bush administration.
Newt's factually challenged analysis has come to be so legendary that even MSNBC's Mike Barnicle felt compelled to ask, "[W]hy would anyone pay attention to anything he says?" It's a good question. Perhaps it's because networks like Fox News do whatever they can to make Gingrich, who hasn't held any office or official position since 1998, relevant.
Health care reform is coming, and the news is already making me sick
All three national networks covered a Thursday town hall meeting that Obama held in Wisconsin, during which he laid out his health care proposals in detail. And yet, not one of them reported on the substance of his remarks, focusing instead on a note he wrote for a 10-year-old girl who was skipping school.
On Friday, NPR's Mara Liasson claimed that the American Medical Association opposes a public plan as a component of health care reform, even though the AMA had backtracked the same day, stating that it was "willing to consider other variations of a public plan that are currently under discussion in Congress." Flaws in a New York Times story the day before about the AMA's position were the subject of Media Matters Senior Fellow Jamison Foser's column this week.
And during a Wednesday interview with Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell freely editorialized, lecturing him on how current proposals seemingly would "drive the deficit into these stratospheric numbers" and complaining that senators were engaging in "gobbledygook" on the issue.
The need for accurate and impartial reporting on impending legislation is made all the more acute by the long history and prevalence of misinformation from media conservatives on the issue. On Thursday, Limbaugh began pulling out the stops, sounding not unlike O'Donnell in the process. "And it's all about control," he said. "It's not about cost. This man's not worried about the cost of anything. He doesn't care what anything costs: a trip to New York for a date -- $12 trillion in debt over 10 years? He doesn't care what things cost." He went on to hypothesize that "exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system" because they keep getting injured.
Buchanan continues to test how much MSNBC will tolerate
Media Matters has already documented Pat Buchanan's racially charged and often sexist campaign against Sotomayor. Despite his recent (and past) behavior, however, MSNBC has provided Buchanan with a prominent platform from which to spew his invective. This week, Foser asked a question MSNBC -- which in the past has had to fire Michael Savage and Don Imus for their remarks -- should answer: just what would Pat Buchanan have to say to be fired from the network?
Well, during this past week, Buchanan was curiously absent from much of MSNBC's commentary. Was it a sign that the network might be re-evaluating its relationship with one of its favorite "analysts"? If so, it should take note of the fact that Buchanan is set to host what the Southern Poverty Law Center called a "prominent white nationalist" at the upcoming conference of The American Cause, a Buchanan-led organization.
Mainstream Medicine and the Oprah Factor
By DEEPAK CHOPRA posted on The Huffington Post
A recent cover story in a struggling news magazine, under the title "Crazy Talk:" accuses Oprah Winfrey of spreading "dubious advice" in a wide range of health issues from menopause and hormone replacement therapy to autism, cancer, aging, and weight loss. The tone of the article was the same tiresome blend of gotcha journalism and selective fact-reporting that fills tabloid coffers.
The story failed to gain traction for obvious reasons. Oprah has aired innumerable shows on health, of which the controversial ones are a tiny minority. Her intention to improve women's lives on all fronts is so obvious as to be almost above criticism. The credibility for women's well-being and welfare she has earned day after day over the past two decades will not be undone with a story that cherry-picks the guests who can be made easy targets of ridicule by the medical establishment. And the fact that she has celebrity guests who have causes and crusades in the area of health, such as Jenny McCarthy or Suzanne Somers, is not the same as Oprah herself endorsing what they say.
The criticism the medical establishment is directing at Oprah through this article only exposes their own frustration in having squandered their credibility with the public. They hope that if they can successfully attack the Oprah's immense credibility, then they can magically get some of that credibility back for themselves. However, if people still trusted the health care industry to act in their best interest the way they did decades ago, then it would be unnecessary to brand Oprah for "crazy talk" simply because she occasionally provides a forum for ideas outside of mainstream medicine.
The medical profession is burdened with a host of problems that Oprah addresses with more candor and force than the AMA. She promotes wellness and prevention, two areas that drastically need improvement. She brings up creative solutions to problems that medical science is baffled by, such as the healing response itself and the role of subjectivity in patient response. These are issues that few M.D.s are willing to explore, yet she has done so for decades.
Instead, we got a response from an oncologist in Canada repeating the establishment position: alternative treatments of cancer are bogus, subjectivity has no place in science, "soul talk" about illness is rubbish. This is exactly the kind of dismissive arrogance that drives millions of people away from conventional doctors. Every illness has a subjective component -- after all, to be sick is to change your moods and emotions, and severe illness causes one to examine primal issues like life and death and the meaning of existence. Do these subjective changes affect healing? Obviously they do, or we wouldn't have the placebo effect, which comes into play at least 30% of the time in illness.
Scientific medicine by and large ignores wellness, prevention, and alternative medicine in general. On a daily basis doctors don't deal in these things; few take courses in medical school centered on them. That's why a massive movement has arisen driven by patients themselves. Oprah serves as a public outlet for a conversation that needs to be ongoing. As long as official medicine, backed by huge pharmaceutical companies, denies the existence of the problem, much less alternative solutions, the movement will remain patient-centered and the attitude toward alternative medicine will be one of unfounded disdain, suspicion, and ignorance on the part of physicians.
Denial also plays a huge part in this story. Mainstream medicine continues to downplay the enormous drawbacks of a health-care system that is addicted to drugs and surgery as the two constant drumbeats of treatment. This lopsided emphasis has created dilemmas that official medicine hasn't remotely solved:
* In Seattle a recent study of 638 patients with chronic lower back pain were given either some sort of acupuncture or standard treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs and massage. On average, the acupuncture patients received twice as much benefit as those on standard treatment. The kicker is that some of the patients received fake acupuncture -- they were pricked superficially with toothpicks -- and received the same relief.
* Iatrogenic disease, roughly defined as illness that results as a complication from a doctor's care, leads to between 230,000 to 284,000 deaths every year, making it the third leading cause of fatality in the country.
* A survey of 1,249 health care professionals found that 81% had taken dietary supplements like vitamins and minerals. This, despite the fact that mainstream doctors frequently tell their patients that the only benefit of such supplements is "expensive urine."
* Two of the most frequently performed surgeries, heart bypass grafts and balloon angioplasty, became fashionable without serious testing (the government approves drugs but not surgical procedures). They continue to be used in the face of perennial findings that neither procedure increases life expectancy. Besides relieving symptoms, which of course can be very troubling to the patient, both procedures carry serious risks. (The most recent finding showed that diabetics with stable heart disease do not survive longer if given heart surgery.)
* In the past, such common procedures as hysterectomies and radical mastectomies were widely performed without testing their efficacy. Not until European results revealed that lumpectomies were often just as effective did American surgeons question the staunch support of mastectomies. One might also consider that surgeons were very slow to perform cosmetic breast replacement for women who faced devastating psychological fallout from their mastectomies -- a typical neglect of any patient's subjective response to illness.
* The benefit of lifestyle changes has been grossly underestimated and underused. Coronary heart disease, prostate cancer/breast cancer, diabetes, and obesity account for 75% of health care costs, yet the progression of these diseases may often be stopped or even reversed by making intensive lifestyle changes. The most recent findings show that such changes actually cause beneficial alterations at the genetic level, affecting up to 400 genes through such measures as improved diet, exercise, and meditation.
* Overall, this country's health care system is actually a "sick care" system. In 2006, $2.1 trillion were spent in the U.S. on medical care, 95% of which was spent to treat disease after it had already occurred.
We're just scratching the surface here. Yet even if these massive problems didn't exist, the Oprah affair raises the question of sins by omission. It's one thing for official medicine to decry alternative medicine and hurl accusations of quackery, not just at the non-M.D.s who work as health practitioners but at licensed, highly educated and qualified physicians who are creative enough to explore new avenues of treatment. Their own lack of curiosity and creative thinking is disturbing. Does the most brilliant researcher in the world know why cancer sometimes spontaneously disappears? Why a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression can respond equally well to talk therapy and drugs -- that is, why talk is as effective as chemicals in altering the brain? Or how the body's healing system is influenced by outside forces?
The answer is no. Which means that mysteries remain to be solved, and creative solutions have every chance of arising from unexpected quarters. Scientific medicine is leery of so-called anecdotal evidence, that is, individual stories of disease and cure. Their skepticism is rational and well-founded. We all agree that without impartial studies, the advance of knowledge becomes chaotic and untrustworthy. But Oprah is letting individuals tell their stories for other, positive reasons: to share their pain, to reach out to others in the same circumstance, to provide hope.
Official medicine falls short on these fronts far too often. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad that the typical TV ad for drugs paints glossy pictures of happy patients running through flowery meadows, ending with a list of every imaginable side effect, including death. The article sneers at the popular movement linking autism with childhood vaccination, yet current understanding looks at autism as a complex, multi-factorial condition in which some cases could be influenced by an outside factor like a vaccine. It's all too easy for medicine to disdain that possibility and cry foul against guests on Oprah's show, raising a smokescreen for the countless irresponsible prescriptions written, especially for elderly patients, by doctors every day.
One fears that all of these arguments will fall on deaf ears, because the schism between official and alternative medicine runs deep -- deep enough that the average physician doesn't bother even to skim the thousands of studies that bolster alternative claims. So let me offer a typical finding that comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other official sources. It concerns the effect of child abuse and other adverse circumstances on later health. Is it "soul talk" to believe that a child raised around parents who abuse substances, who suffer from mental illness, or who outright abuse the child will suffer health risks later in life?
According to the CDC study, covering 15,000 HMO members in San Diego between 1995-97, the risk of contracting an autoimmune disease as an adult is increased from 70% to 100% if you happened to be abused as a child or grow up with adverse home conditions. This finding isn't isolated. Autoimmune diseases are one in which the body's immune system attacks the body itself. There are few known causes; it is baffling to grasp why the body's chief defender against illness should turn around and become the cause of illness. This study suggests a human connection rather than a biological one. Or rather, human distress leads to biological distress. Doctors don't officially believe that; millions of ordinary citizens do. Earlier studies had already correlated adverse childhood conditions with the risk of inflammatory conditions. In the little picture, a new finding has been added to the long list of mind-body links for illness and aging. In the bigger picture, the fact that we don't fully understand the mind-body connection, much less use it for healing in official medicine, comes into glaring relief.
What this tells me is that medicine needs Oprah and other patient advocates who are demanding that official medicine heal itself. To accuse them of lacking medial credibility is a red herring. Patients aren't supposed to know more than their physicians. The fact that they often do, at least insofar as alternative treatment goes, is both a sign of hope and cause for distress.
A recent cover story in a struggling news magazine, under the title "Crazy Talk:" accuses Oprah Winfrey of spreading "dubious advice" in a wide range of health issues from menopause and hormone replacement therapy to autism, cancer, aging, and weight loss. The tone of the article was the same tiresome blend of gotcha journalism and selective fact-reporting that fills tabloid coffers.
The story failed to gain traction for obvious reasons. Oprah has aired innumerable shows on health, of which the controversial ones are a tiny minority. Her intention to improve women's lives on all fronts is so obvious as to be almost above criticism. The credibility for women's well-being and welfare she has earned day after day over the past two decades will not be undone with a story that cherry-picks the guests who can be made easy targets of ridicule by the medical establishment. And the fact that she has celebrity guests who have causes and crusades in the area of health, such as Jenny McCarthy or Suzanne Somers, is not the same as Oprah herself endorsing what they say.
The criticism the medical establishment is directing at Oprah through this article only exposes their own frustration in having squandered their credibility with the public. They hope that if they can successfully attack the Oprah's immense credibility, then they can magically get some of that credibility back for themselves. However, if people still trusted the health care industry to act in their best interest the way they did decades ago, then it would be unnecessary to brand Oprah for "crazy talk" simply because she occasionally provides a forum for ideas outside of mainstream medicine.
The medical profession is burdened with a host of problems that Oprah addresses with more candor and force than the AMA. She promotes wellness and prevention, two areas that drastically need improvement. She brings up creative solutions to problems that medical science is baffled by, such as the healing response itself and the role of subjectivity in patient response. These are issues that few M.D.s are willing to explore, yet she has done so for decades.
Instead, we got a response from an oncologist in Canada repeating the establishment position: alternative treatments of cancer are bogus, subjectivity has no place in science, "soul talk" about illness is rubbish. This is exactly the kind of dismissive arrogance that drives millions of people away from conventional doctors. Every illness has a subjective component -- after all, to be sick is to change your moods and emotions, and severe illness causes one to examine primal issues like life and death and the meaning of existence. Do these subjective changes affect healing? Obviously they do, or we wouldn't have the placebo effect, which comes into play at least 30% of the time in illness.
Scientific medicine by and large ignores wellness, prevention, and alternative medicine in general. On a daily basis doctors don't deal in these things; few take courses in medical school centered on them. That's why a massive movement has arisen driven by patients themselves. Oprah serves as a public outlet for a conversation that needs to be ongoing. As long as official medicine, backed by huge pharmaceutical companies, denies the existence of the problem, much less alternative solutions, the movement will remain patient-centered and the attitude toward alternative medicine will be one of unfounded disdain, suspicion, and ignorance on the part of physicians.
Denial also plays a huge part in this story. Mainstream medicine continues to downplay the enormous drawbacks of a health-care system that is addicted to drugs and surgery as the two constant drumbeats of treatment. This lopsided emphasis has created dilemmas that official medicine hasn't remotely solved:
* In Seattle a recent study of 638 patients with chronic lower back pain were given either some sort of acupuncture or standard treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs and massage. On average, the acupuncture patients received twice as much benefit as those on standard treatment. The kicker is that some of the patients received fake acupuncture -- they were pricked superficially with toothpicks -- and received the same relief.
* Iatrogenic disease, roughly defined as illness that results as a complication from a doctor's care, leads to between 230,000 to 284,000 deaths every year, making it the third leading cause of fatality in the country.
* A survey of 1,249 health care professionals found that 81% had taken dietary supplements like vitamins and minerals. This, despite the fact that mainstream doctors frequently tell their patients that the only benefit of such supplements is "expensive urine."
* Two of the most frequently performed surgeries, heart bypass grafts and balloon angioplasty, became fashionable without serious testing (the government approves drugs but not surgical procedures). They continue to be used in the face of perennial findings that neither procedure increases life expectancy. Besides relieving symptoms, which of course can be very troubling to the patient, both procedures carry serious risks. (The most recent finding showed that diabetics with stable heart disease do not survive longer if given heart surgery.)
* In the past, such common procedures as hysterectomies and radical mastectomies were widely performed without testing their efficacy. Not until European results revealed that lumpectomies were often just as effective did American surgeons question the staunch support of mastectomies. One might also consider that surgeons were very slow to perform cosmetic breast replacement for women who faced devastating psychological fallout from their mastectomies -- a typical neglect of any patient's subjective response to illness.
* The benefit of lifestyle changes has been grossly underestimated and underused. Coronary heart disease, prostate cancer/breast cancer, diabetes, and obesity account for 75% of health care costs, yet the progression of these diseases may often be stopped or even reversed by making intensive lifestyle changes. The most recent findings show that such changes actually cause beneficial alterations at the genetic level, affecting up to 400 genes through such measures as improved diet, exercise, and meditation.
* Overall, this country's health care system is actually a "sick care" system. In 2006, $2.1 trillion were spent in the U.S. on medical care, 95% of which was spent to treat disease after it had already occurred.
We're just scratching the surface here. Yet even if these massive problems didn't exist, the Oprah affair raises the question of sins by omission. It's one thing for official medicine to decry alternative medicine and hurl accusations of quackery, not just at the non-M.D.s who work as health practitioners but at licensed, highly educated and qualified physicians who are creative enough to explore new avenues of treatment. Their own lack of curiosity and creative thinking is disturbing. Does the most brilliant researcher in the world know why cancer sometimes spontaneously disappears? Why a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression can respond equally well to talk therapy and drugs -- that is, why talk is as effective as chemicals in altering the brain? Or how the body's healing system is influenced by outside forces?
The answer is no. Which means that mysteries remain to be solved, and creative solutions have every chance of arising from unexpected quarters. Scientific medicine is leery of so-called anecdotal evidence, that is, individual stories of disease and cure. Their skepticism is rational and well-founded. We all agree that without impartial studies, the advance of knowledge becomes chaotic and untrustworthy. But Oprah is letting individuals tell their stories for other, positive reasons: to share their pain, to reach out to others in the same circumstance, to provide hope.
Official medicine falls short on these fronts far too often. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad that the typical TV ad for drugs paints glossy pictures of happy patients running through flowery meadows, ending with a list of every imaginable side effect, including death. The article sneers at the popular movement linking autism with childhood vaccination, yet current understanding looks at autism as a complex, multi-factorial condition in which some cases could be influenced by an outside factor like a vaccine. It's all too easy for medicine to disdain that possibility and cry foul against guests on Oprah's show, raising a smokescreen for the countless irresponsible prescriptions written, especially for elderly patients, by doctors every day.
One fears that all of these arguments will fall on deaf ears, because the schism between official and alternative medicine runs deep -- deep enough that the average physician doesn't bother even to skim the thousands of studies that bolster alternative claims. So let me offer a typical finding that comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other official sources. It concerns the effect of child abuse and other adverse circumstances on later health. Is it "soul talk" to believe that a child raised around parents who abuse substances, who suffer from mental illness, or who outright abuse the child will suffer health risks later in life?
According to the CDC study, covering 15,000 HMO members in San Diego between 1995-97, the risk of contracting an autoimmune disease as an adult is increased from 70% to 100% if you happened to be abused as a child or grow up with adverse home conditions. This finding isn't isolated. Autoimmune diseases are one in which the body's immune system attacks the body itself. There are few known causes; it is baffling to grasp why the body's chief defender against illness should turn around and become the cause of illness. This study suggests a human connection rather than a biological one. Or rather, human distress leads to biological distress. Doctors don't officially believe that; millions of ordinary citizens do. Earlier studies had already correlated adverse childhood conditions with the risk of inflammatory conditions. In the little picture, a new finding has been added to the long list of mind-body links for illness and aging. In the bigger picture, the fact that we don't fully understand the mind-body connection, much less use it for healing in official medicine, comes into glaring relief.
What this tells me is that medicine needs Oprah and other patient advocates who are demanding that official medicine heal itself. To accuse them of lacking medial credibility is a red herring. Patients aren't supposed to know more than their physicians. The fact that they often do, at least insofar as alternative treatment goes, is both a sign of hope and cause for distress.
Friday, June 12, 2009
The Big Hate
NY TIMES By PAUL KRUGMAN
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).
But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.
It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.” And when Jon Voight, the actor, told the audience at a Republican fund-raiser this week that the president is a “false prophet” and that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, thanked him, saying that he “really enjoyed” the remarks.
Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate — people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).
But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.
It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.” And when Jon Voight, the actor, told the audience at a Republican fund-raiser this week that the president is a “false prophet” and that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, thanked him, saying that he “really enjoyed” the remarks.
Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate — people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The HILL Healthcare SPECIAL REPORT
Read all you want by going to www.thehill.com
For the sake of all Americans, the time for reform has come
by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)
An imperative that can’t wait
by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
Avoiding partisan fireworks
by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
How to compete with private insurers on level playing field
by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Greater risk-sharing promises lower costs with more security
by Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine)
For families, businesses — an option that promotes care and competition
by Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.)
Turn the pyramids right side up
by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.)
Help fulfill the promise of America
by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)
Take the time to get reform right
by Sen.Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)
To GOP, reform is about wider access, lower prices, not government control
by Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)
First, do no harm
by Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas)
The need for a robust public option
by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)
Reform lacks transparency, bipartisanship
by Rep. Charles W. Boustany, Jr (R-La.)
A back-door path to a government takeover
by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.)
Bridging the divide over the ideological ground zero on care
by Tom Daschle
On public plan, it’s provider beware
by Newt Gingrich
Reform without creating a public insurance option is not real change
by Howard Dean
Health reform must include an aggressive cancer strategy
by Lance Armstrong
For the sake of all Americans, the time for reform has come
by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)
An imperative that can’t wait
by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
Avoiding partisan fireworks
by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
How to compete with private insurers on level playing field
by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Greater risk-sharing promises lower costs with more security
by Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine)
For families, businesses — an option that promotes care and competition
by Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.)
Turn the pyramids right side up
by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.)
Help fulfill the promise of America
by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)
Take the time to get reform right
by Sen.Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)
To GOP, reform is about wider access, lower prices, not government control
by Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)
First, do no harm
by Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas)
The need for a robust public option
by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)
Reform lacks transparency, bipartisanship
by Rep. Charles W. Boustany, Jr (R-La.)
A back-door path to a government takeover
by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.)
Bridging the divide over the ideological ground zero on care
by Tom Daschle
On public plan, it’s provider beware
by Newt Gingrich
Reform without creating a public insurance option is not real change
by Howard Dean
Health reform must include an aggressive cancer strategy
by Lance Armstrong
Why aren't women happy? Who knows?
Angelina Jolie's Oscar-winning, hot-looking existence is as good a reason as any.
Meghan Daum LA Times
Women, it seems, are bummed out these days.
A study released last month from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Pennsylvania showed that even though men's and women's happiness levels have both gone down over the last few decades, women's "subjective well-being" has declined "both absolutely and relatively to men." The data came from a cross-section of ethnic and socioeconomic groups in several industrialized countries, and appeared to be big news primarily for one reason: When the same research was conducted in the 1970s, women reported higher levels of happiness than they do today.
Is that because feminism turned out to be a total dud? Or were women in the '70s hypnotized into serenity by those yellow smiley faces? No one seems quite sure.
The research paper, which was presented by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and will appear in a forthcoming issue of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, is rife with hypotheses but resists drawing conclusions. But that doesn't mean the commentariat didn't immediately weigh in. People went a little nuts over this study, most notably New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who offered up a handful of theories as to why women weren't as cheery as they'd apparently been in the days of avocado-green appliances.
"The achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness," Douthat wrote. He also pointed out that the steady advance and de-stigmatization of single motherhood "threatens the interests and happiness of women." Furthermore, in a display of rhetorical showmanship that I appreciated for its boldness if not its conclusion, he wondered if women, who "prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies," were made anxious by "the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era."
In fairness, Douthat allowed that "all this ambiguity lends itself to broad-brush readings." He wasn't saying the study proved any of his musings. He was just, you know, saying.
And shortly thereafter, a lot of other people joined the chorus: other columnists, bloggers and, presumably, the women at book club meetings who would much rather discuss this sort of thing than discuss the book they're reading. Many of them took umbrage at Douthat's column, but more seemed intent on finding the source of this newly discovered malcontent. Was it over-scheduling? Over-parenting? A cultural obsession with physical appearance? Perhaps only Betty Friedan could know for sure.
The researchers, for their part, seem to have anticipated the avalanche of armchair analysis. In the paper, they address a handful of the more predictable assumptions and explanations, giving reasons as to why they're best kept within the realm of the theoretical.
Take, for example, two of the most common versus the actual wording of their paper.
Theory 1: The women's movement sold women a bill of goods. All it did was make them feel inadequate for not "having it all."
Stevenson/Wolfers: "If the women's movement raised women's expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives. As women's expectations move into alignment with their experiences, this decline in happiness may reverse."
Translation: "Having it all" is going out of fashion. When women stop trying to live up to that edict, they will be happier.
Theory 2: The demands on working mothers, particularly single mothers, are overwhelming and contribute to unhappiness.
Stevenson/Wolfers: "[When] we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents ... we see similar trends in happiness ... casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood or work/family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women."
Translation: Don't blame your kids, your job or your partner.
In other words, the upshot of the increase in female unhappiness seems to be that there's no upshot.
As a pusher of far-flung theories myself, I know how tedious it can be when the raw data don't line up with the stuff I yak about with my friends in wine bars. Like Douthat et al, when I first heard about the study, I immediately had a scapegoat too: Angelina Jolie. Her entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy. I mean, duh.
But like all of these explanations, that's a little bit too easy even if, to some, it also seems a little bit right. And as many have pointed out, "happiness" is ultimately an abstraction (not to mention in the eye of the beholder) and may simply defy quantitative measurement.
So why is it so hard to resist making a sport of figuring out why we are or aren't happy? Maybe because it's just that, a sport. Maybe because, as most women in book clubs know, talking about what's wrong with your life can be rollicking fun. We may not be happy, but we know how to have a good time. And that includes blaming Angelina.
Meghan Daum LA Times
Women, it seems, are bummed out these days.
A study released last month from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Pennsylvania showed that even though men's and women's happiness levels have both gone down over the last few decades, women's "subjective well-being" has declined "both absolutely and relatively to men." The data came from a cross-section of ethnic and socioeconomic groups in several industrialized countries, and appeared to be big news primarily for one reason: When the same research was conducted in the 1970s, women reported higher levels of happiness than they do today.
Is that because feminism turned out to be a total dud? Or were women in the '70s hypnotized into serenity by those yellow smiley faces? No one seems quite sure.
The research paper, which was presented by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and will appear in a forthcoming issue of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, is rife with hypotheses but resists drawing conclusions. But that doesn't mean the commentariat didn't immediately weigh in. People went a little nuts over this study, most notably New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who offered up a handful of theories as to why women weren't as cheery as they'd apparently been in the days of avocado-green appliances.
"The achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness," Douthat wrote. He also pointed out that the steady advance and de-stigmatization of single motherhood "threatens the interests and happiness of women." Furthermore, in a display of rhetorical showmanship that I appreciated for its boldness if not its conclusion, he wondered if women, who "prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies," were made anxious by "the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era."
In fairness, Douthat allowed that "all this ambiguity lends itself to broad-brush readings." He wasn't saying the study proved any of his musings. He was just, you know, saying.
And shortly thereafter, a lot of other people joined the chorus: other columnists, bloggers and, presumably, the women at book club meetings who would much rather discuss this sort of thing than discuss the book they're reading. Many of them took umbrage at Douthat's column, but more seemed intent on finding the source of this newly discovered malcontent. Was it over-scheduling? Over-parenting? A cultural obsession with physical appearance? Perhaps only Betty Friedan could know for sure.
The researchers, for their part, seem to have anticipated the avalanche of armchair analysis. In the paper, they address a handful of the more predictable assumptions and explanations, giving reasons as to why they're best kept within the realm of the theoretical.
Take, for example, two of the most common versus the actual wording of their paper.
Theory 1: The women's movement sold women a bill of goods. All it did was make them feel inadequate for not "having it all."
Stevenson/Wolfers: "If the women's movement raised women's expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives. As women's expectations move into alignment with their experiences, this decline in happiness may reverse."
Translation: "Having it all" is going out of fashion. When women stop trying to live up to that edict, they will be happier.
Theory 2: The demands on working mothers, particularly single mothers, are overwhelming and contribute to unhappiness.
Stevenson/Wolfers: "[When] we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents ... we see similar trends in happiness ... casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood or work/family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women."
Translation: Don't blame your kids, your job or your partner.
In other words, the upshot of the increase in female unhappiness seems to be that there's no upshot.
As a pusher of far-flung theories myself, I know how tedious it can be when the raw data don't line up with the stuff I yak about with my friends in wine bars. Like Douthat et al, when I first heard about the study, I immediately had a scapegoat too: Angelina Jolie. Her entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy. I mean, duh.
But like all of these explanations, that's a little bit too easy even if, to some, it also seems a little bit right. And as many have pointed out, "happiness" is ultimately an abstraction (not to mention in the eye of the beholder) and may simply defy quantitative measurement.
So why is it so hard to resist making a sport of figuring out why we are or aren't happy? Maybe because it's just that, a sport. Maybe because, as most women in book clubs know, talking about what's wrong with your life can be rollicking fun. We may not be happy, but we know how to have a good time. And that includes blaming Angelina.
Supreme Court TV
How does Judge Sotomayor feel about cameras in the courtroom?
In 1996, Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter told a congressional committee that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.” Fortunately, Souter's impending retirement will spare his colleagues -- if not a television audience -- that spectacle. It also creates the possibility that his successor will join other recent appointees in opening the door wider to televised oral arguments.
So, after they are finished asking about abortion and wise Latinas, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee should elicit Judge Sonia Sotomayor's views of TV cameras in the court. President Bush's two nominees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., didn't echo Souter's alarm. Roberts told the Judiciary Committee he had no "set view" on the subject. Alito recalled: "We had a debate within our [federal appeals] court about whether we would or should allow television cameras in our courtroom. I argued that we should do it."
Since their confirmations, Alito and Roberts have been somewhat more cautious. The justices as a group are divided in their personal attitudes toward cameras, but united in a preference to do nothing in the near future. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2000 that "I would not object, just for myself," but she added that cameras shouldn't be forced on colleagues who disagreed. Justice Stephen G. Breyer had this (too) judicious response in 2005: "I think there are good reasons for it and good reasons against it." Leading the naysayers are justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Thomas has undergone a post-confirmation conversion, telling senators in 1991 that he had no objection to cameras but arguing more recently that, after 9/11, televising the faces of justices would make them vulnerable to terrorism. Then there is Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's comment in 2007 that if cameras were present, he might suspect a colleague of "saying something for a sound bite."
All these objections have been convincingly refuted. Terrorists who wonder what justices look like can consult still pictures or videos of law school seminars. As for the idea that justices would show off to ensure a few seconds on the evening news: Federal judges serve for life; they don't have to rely on good Nielsen ratings. Moreover, courts that have allowed televised arguments -- as the California Supreme Court did for arguments on same-sex marriage -- haven't inspired judges to ham it up. Finally, the contention that cameras would alter the traditions of the court has been undermined by recent innovations such as the same-day release of audio recordings of high-profile arguments and the prompt posting on the Internet of transcripts.
An assertive advocate of cameras in the court could help nudge her colleagues to take the next step. How about it, Judge Sotomayor?
Source: LA Times
In 1996, Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter told a congressional committee that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.” Fortunately, Souter's impending retirement will spare his colleagues -- if not a television audience -- that spectacle. It also creates the possibility that his successor will join other recent appointees in opening the door wider to televised oral arguments.
So, after they are finished asking about abortion and wise Latinas, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee should elicit Judge Sonia Sotomayor's views of TV cameras in the court. President Bush's two nominees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., didn't echo Souter's alarm. Roberts told the Judiciary Committee he had no "set view" on the subject. Alito recalled: "We had a debate within our [federal appeals] court about whether we would or should allow television cameras in our courtroom. I argued that we should do it."
Since their confirmations, Alito and Roberts have been somewhat more cautious. The justices as a group are divided in their personal attitudes toward cameras, but united in a preference to do nothing in the near future. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2000 that "I would not object, just for myself," but she added that cameras shouldn't be forced on colleagues who disagreed. Justice Stephen G. Breyer had this (too) judicious response in 2005: "I think there are good reasons for it and good reasons against it." Leading the naysayers are justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Thomas has undergone a post-confirmation conversion, telling senators in 1991 that he had no objection to cameras but arguing more recently that, after 9/11, televising the faces of justices would make them vulnerable to terrorism. Then there is Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's comment in 2007 that if cameras were present, he might suspect a colleague of "saying something for a sound bite."
All these objections have been convincingly refuted. Terrorists who wonder what justices look like can consult still pictures or videos of law school seminars. As for the idea that justices would show off to ensure a few seconds on the evening news: Federal judges serve for life; they don't have to rely on good Nielsen ratings. Moreover, courts that have allowed televised arguments -- as the California Supreme Court did for arguments on same-sex marriage -- haven't inspired judges to ham it up. Finally, the contention that cameras would alter the traditions of the court has been undermined by recent innovations such as the same-day release of audio recordings of high-profile arguments and the prompt posting on the Internet of transcripts.
An assertive advocate of cameras in the court could help nudge her colleagues to take the next step. How about it, Judge Sotomayor?
Source: LA Times
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
USA TODAY Poll: Most don't know who speaks for GOP
WASHINGTON — Republicans, out of power and divided over how to get it back, are finding even the most basic questions hard to answer.
Here's one: Who speaks for the GOP?
The question flummoxes most Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, which is among the reasons for the party's sagging state and uncertain direction.
A 52% majority of those surveyed couldn't come up with a name when asked to specify "the main person" who speaks for Republicans today. Of those who could, the top response was radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh (13%), followed in order by former vice president Dick Cheney, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Former president George W. Bush ranked fifth, at 3%.
So the dominant faces of the Republican Party are all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP, ranging in age from 58 (Limbaugh) to 72 (McCain). They include some of the country's most strident voices on issues from Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court to President Obama's policies at home and abroad. Two are retired from politics, and one has never been a candidate.
Only McCain holds elective office, and his age and status as the loser of last year's presidential election make him an unlikely standard bearer for the party's future.
"It's a problem," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an adviser to McCain's 2008 presidential campaign who this month is filing the papers to create a think tank aimed at generating new ideas for conservatives. "We need the perceived leadership of the party to be those who are the future."
"We cannot be a party of balding white guys," says former Republican Party national chairman Ed Gillespie, a White House counselor for George W. Bush. "We have to have a broader appeal, but there's time for us to make that change."
Republicans have seen an erosion of support across almost all demographic groups — the steepest decline since World War II, even bigger than in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Since 2004, Republicans have gone from a 3 percentage point advantage in party identification over Democrats in USA TODAY polls to a 7 point disadvantage.
In that time, the GOP has lost control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is struggling to forge a united response to the popular new Democratic president. The result has been to give Obama "an extension" to his political honeymoon, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says.
No surprise, then, that a debate rages over what to do next.
The annual Congressional Republican fundraising dinner Monday prompted weeks of political drama over who would deliver the keynote address. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's name was announced, but when questions arose over her schedule Gingrich was tapped. Then a last-minute kerfuffle developed over whether Palin, McCain's running mate, would attend after all.
In the end, she showed up at the Washington Convention Center, walked across the stage and waved but didn't speak. He delivered an hour-long, policy-laden address that castigated Obama for having "already failed" on the economy and called for a "majority Republican Party" that would tolerate disparate views.
In recent days, the party's divisions over Sotomayor have played out in public.
At one end of the spectrum, Limbaugh labeled the appellate judge a racist and Gingrich said she should be forced to withdraw, although he later backed away from his harshest words. At the other, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, praised the nominee's judicial philosophy and defended Sotomayor's temperament after meeting with her last week.
"We're undergoing, obviously, an identity problem, both in terms of the issues and what we represent as Republicans, what the Republican brand is all about," Snowe says. One of the few moderate Republicans left in the Senate — their ranks shrank when Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched to the Democrats — she worries her party has "lost its way."
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who declined to be interviewed about the GOP's future, has been caught in the crossfire between Limbaugh and others. (In the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, only 1% said Steele spoke for the GOP.)
USA TODAY asked whether Republicans, to succeed, should either do a better job arguing for conservative views or change positions on some issues to appeal to moderates — an ongoing debate within the party. Cheney sparked headlines last month when he said on CBS' Face the Nation that he would rather have a GOP defined by the conservative Limbaugh than the moderate former secretary of State, Colin Powell.
A majority of those surveyed said the party should make changes to draw moderates. Among Republicans, however, nearly two-thirds said the party would be better off by holding a conservative line and advocating it more effectively — as Limbaugh advocates.
"They're disorganized, they don't have a leader, and they're trying to be too moderate," Kim Lowe, 43, of Charlotte, says. The conservative stay-at-home mom and interior designer, who was among those surveyed, predicts that a message of fiscal responsibility ultimately will prevail with voters.
"I believe they'll come back once America sees what Obama is doing," she says.
'Politics is self-correcting'
Political fortunes are cyclical, of course. Republicans were crushed in Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide but regained the White House four years later amid turmoil over civil rights and the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, Democratic liberals and centrists faced off, sometimes bitterly, over welfare, crime and other issues until Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992.
"When you have a party out of power, especially after you've lost an election, it's not surprising there would be many voices competing to speak," says Frank Donatelli, who was political director in the Reagan White House and helped run the Republican National Committee for the McCain campaign last year.
Republican opportunities will come in response to Democratic excesses, Donatelli says: "Politics is self-correcting."
In time, the GOP will be defined and led by its presidential nominee, he says. Several prospects are laying the groundwork for potential runs in 2012.
Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced he wouldn't seek a third term, stoking speculation that he is interested in the White House. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Gingrich have been making appearances in key primary states.
Republican candidates also are competitive in this year's two gubernatorial races, in New Jersey and Virginia, for seats now held by Democrats. Winning either would help Republicans argue they are making a comeback.
Still, some see the GOP's immediate plight as perilous.
"We're in the basement of a 100-story building," says Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who advised the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1984, independent Ross Perot in 1992 and Huckabee in 2008.
Rollins says next year's congressional and state legislative elections are crucial. If Republicans don't make significant gains in the House, he says, the redrawing of congressional district lines after the 2010 Census could lock in Democratic advantages for a decade.
Then there are the demographics of the GOP's decline.
From Bush's inauguration in 2001 to Obama's inauguration in 2009, Republicans lost significant support among nearly every major demographic group, according to a Gallup analysis — among men and women, Americans at all income levels, residents of every region and those ages 18-64.
The losses were particularly steep among those under 30, the rising Millennial generation. Support for the GOP among college graduates fell by about 10 percentage points. Surveys of voters as they left polling places also showed a significant decline among Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.
Republicans maintained support among seniors, conservatives and frequent churchgoers.
To win elections, Gillespie says, the party needs to make more inroads among the rapidly expanding parts of the population. "I was not a math major, but I know that getting an increasing share of a decreasing percentage of the overall vote is not a good thing," he says. "That's what we're doing now."
"The world has changed, and they cannot be staying in the same place where they've been for the last 200 years," says Erika Quinteros, 63, an independent from suburban Philadelphia who was called in the survey. The retired doctor sometimes votes for Republicans — she liked former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge— but says the current GOP seems "too radical" for her.
In the poll, 34% had a favorable impression of the Republican Party, matching the lowest level in more than a decade. In comparison, 53% had a favorable impression of the Democratic Party.
Dissatisfaction with the GOP extends to within its own ranks. Among Republicans, 33% had an unfavorable impression of their own party. In contrast, 4% of Democrats had an unfavorable impression of their party.
The GOP's electoral setbacks, policy divisions and image problems make it harder for the party to influence the national debate.
"It's as if the Republican Party is in a time-out chair," says Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of the non-partisan Cook Political Report. "Nobody's really listening to them. Nobody's caring what they think. The question is when they're asked to rejoin the class, are they going to have something new or different to say?"
"I don't think people know what they stand for," says Troy Collett, 39, a Republican from Shelbyville, Ind., who was surveyed. In the 2008 election, he says, "all they knew was there was a war in Iraq that most people disagreed with, and spending was out of control, and gas prices were high."
A GOP 'wilderness'
Asked by Gallup "what comes to mind when you think of the Republican Party," 25% said "unfavorable" and another 1 in 4 offered negative assessments including "no direction," "close-minded" and "poor economic conditions." Sixteen percent said "conservative" and 7% "favorable."
For the Democratic Party, the most dominant impression was "liberal," mentioned by 15%. One in 3 used positive phrases such as "for the people" and "socially conscious." The most prevalent negative judgments saw the Democrats as "big spending" (8%) and "self-centered" (4%).
The survey of 1,015 adults, taken by land line and cellphone May 29-31, has a margin of error of +/– 3 percentage points.
Like the Democrats or not, there was a broad consensus about who speaks for the party. Obama was named by 58%. He was followed by 11% who cited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 3% who cited Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Twenty-one percent couldn't come up with a name.
And Obama's popularity — 67% had a favorable opinion of him — is boosting his party. Even the 14-year-old daughter of Rollins, the Republican strategist, has put up posters of the president in her bedroom.
Some analysts say a stumble by the president and the Democrat-controlled Congress would give Republicans their best opportunity to recover.
"Republicans are counting on the Obama administration to disintegrate, to disappoint, very rapidly and very spectacularly, and a big popular movement of unhappiness with the administration to coalesce," says David Frum, a speechwriter in the Bush White House.
Frum, who says the party hasn't yet come to terms with its problems, has launched a website called newmajority.com to encourage a debate.
"There's a lot of time and nothing wrong with the Republican Party that health care reform or the cap-and-trade (energy plan) or something like that blowing up wouldn't help fix," Cook says.
At the moment, though, "Republicans are going through a wilderness period, and it may take a while to come out of it."
SUSAN PAGE - USA Today.
Here's one: Who speaks for the GOP?
The question flummoxes most Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, which is among the reasons for the party's sagging state and uncertain direction.
A 52% majority of those surveyed couldn't come up with a name when asked to specify "the main person" who speaks for Republicans today. Of those who could, the top response was radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh (13%), followed in order by former vice president Dick Cheney, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Former president George W. Bush ranked fifth, at 3%.
So the dominant faces of the Republican Party are all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP, ranging in age from 58 (Limbaugh) to 72 (McCain). They include some of the country's most strident voices on issues from Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court to President Obama's policies at home and abroad. Two are retired from politics, and one has never been a candidate.
Only McCain holds elective office, and his age and status as the loser of last year's presidential election make him an unlikely standard bearer for the party's future.
"It's a problem," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an adviser to McCain's 2008 presidential campaign who this month is filing the papers to create a think tank aimed at generating new ideas for conservatives. "We need the perceived leadership of the party to be those who are the future."
"We cannot be a party of balding white guys," says former Republican Party national chairman Ed Gillespie, a White House counselor for George W. Bush. "We have to have a broader appeal, but there's time for us to make that change."
Republicans have seen an erosion of support across almost all demographic groups — the steepest decline since World War II, even bigger than in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Since 2004, Republicans have gone from a 3 percentage point advantage in party identification over Democrats in USA TODAY polls to a 7 point disadvantage.
In that time, the GOP has lost control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is struggling to forge a united response to the popular new Democratic president. The result has been to give Obama "an extension" to his political honeymoon, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says.
No surprise, then, that a debate rages over what to do next.
The annual Congressional Republican fundraising dinner Monday prompted weeks of political drama over who would deliver the keynote address. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's name was announced, but when questions arose over her schedule Gingrich was tapped. Then a last-minute kerfuffle developed over whether Palin, McCain's running mate, would attend after all.
In the end, she showed up at the Washington Convention Center, walked across the stage and waved but didn't speak. He delivered an hour-long, policy-laden address that castigated Obama for having "already failed" on the economy and called for a "majority Republican Party" that would tolerate disparate views.
In recent days, the party's divisions over Sotomayor have played out in public.
At one end of the spectrum, Limbaugh labeled the appellate judge a racist and Gingrich said she should be forced to withdraw, although he later backed away from his harshest words. At the other, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, praised the nominee's judicial philosophy and defended Sotomayor's temperament after meeting with her last week.
"We're undergoing, obviously, an identity problem, both in terms of the issues and what we represent as Republicans, what the Republican brand is all about," Snowe says. One of the few moderate Republicans left in the Senate — their ranks shrank when Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched to the Democrats — she worries her party has "lost its way."
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who declined to be interviewed about the GOP's future, has been caught in the crossfire between Limbaugh and others. (In the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, only 1% said Steele spoke for the GOP.)
USA TODAY asked whether Republicans, to succeed, should either do a better job arguing for conservative views or change positions on some issues to appeal to moderates — an ongoing debate within the party. Cheney sparked headlines last month when he said on CBS' Face the Nation that he would rather have a GOP defined by the conservative Limbaugh than the moderate former secretary of State, Colin Powell.
A majority of those surveyed said the party should make changes to draw moderates. Among Republicans, however, nearly two-thirds said the party would be better off by holding a conservative line and advocating it more effectively — as Limbaugh advocates.
"They're disorganized, they don't have a leader, and they're trying to be too moderate," Kim Lowe, 43, of Charlotte, says. The conservative stay-at-home mom and interior designer, who was among those surveyed, predicts that a message of fiscal responsibility ultimately will prevail with voters.
"I believe they'll come back once America sees what Obama is doing," she says.
'Politics is self-correcting'
Political fortunes are cyclical, of course. Republicans were crushed in Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide but regained the White House four years later amid turmoil over civil rights and the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, Democratic liberals and centrists faced off, sometimes bitterly, over welfare, crime and other issues until Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992.
"When you have a party out of power, especially after you've lost an election, it's not surprising there would be many voices competing to speak," says Frank Donatelli, who was political director in the Reagan White House and helped run the Republican National Committee for the McCain campaign last year.
Republican opportunities will come in response to Democratic excesses, Donatelli says: "Politics is self-correcting."
In time, the GOP will be defined and led by its presidential nominee, he says. Several prospects are laying the groundwork for potential runs in 2012.
Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced he wouldn't seek a third term, stoking speculation that he is interested in the White House. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Gingrich have been making appearances in key primary states.
Republican candidates also are competitive in this year's two gubernatorial races, in New Jersey and Virginia, for seats now held by Democrats. Winning either would help Republicans argue they are making a comeback.
Still, some see the GOP's immediate plight as perilous.
"We're in the basement of a 100-story building," says Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who advised the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1984, independent Ross Perot in 1992 and Huckabee in 2008.
Rollins says next year's congressional and state legislative elections are crucial. If Republicans don't make significant gains in the House, he says, the redrawing of congressional district lines after the 2010 Census could lock in Democratic advantages for a decade.
Then there are the demographics of the GOP's decline.
From Bush's inauguration in 2001 to Obama's inauguration in 2009, Republicans lost significant support among nearly every major demographic group, according to a Gallup analysis — among men and women, Americans at all income levels, residents of every region and those ages 18-64.
The losses were particularly steep among those under 30, the rising Millennial generation. Support for the GOP among college graduates fell by about 10 percentage points. Surveys of voters as they left polling places also showed a significant decline among Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing ethnic group.
Republicans maintained support among seniors, conservatives and frequent churchgoers.
To win elections, Gillespie says, the party needs to make more inroads among the rapidly expanding parts of the population. "I was not a math major, but I know that getting an increasing share of a decreasing percentage of the overall vote is not a good thing," he says. "That's what we're doing now."
"The world has changed, and they cannot be staying in the same place where they've been for the last 200 years," says Erika Quinteros, 63, an independent from suburban Philadelphia who was called in the survey. The retired doctor sometimes votes for Republicans — she liked former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge— but says the current GOP seems "too radical" for her.
In the poll, 34% had a favorable impression of the Republican Party, matching the lowest level in more than a decade. In comparison, 53% had a favorable impression of the Democratic Party.
Dissatisfaction with the GOP extends to within its own ranks. Among Republicans, 33% had an unfavorable impression of their own party. In contrast, 4% of Democrats had an unfavorable impression of their party.
The GOP's electoral setbacks, policy divisions and image problems make it harder for the party to influence the national debate.
"It's as if the Republican Party is in a time-out chair," says Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of the non-partisan Cook Political Report. "Nobody's really listening to them. Nobody's caring what they think. The question is when they're asked to rejoin the class, are they going to have something new or different to say?"
"I don't think people know what they stand for," says Troy Collett, 39, a Republican from Shelbyville, Ind., who was surveyed. In the 2008 election, he says, "all they knew was there was a war in Iraq that most people disagreed with, and spending was out of control, and gas prices were high."
A GOP 'wilderness'
Asked by Gallup "what comes to mind when you think of the Republican Party," 25% said "unfavorable" and another 1 in 4 offered negative assessments including "no direction," "close-minded" and "poor economic conditions." Sixteen percent said "conservative" and 7% "favorable."
For the Democratic Party, the most dominant impression was "liberal," mentioned by 15%. One in 3 used positive phrases such as "for the people" and "socially conscious." The most prevalent negative judgments saw the Democrats as "big spending" (8%) and "self-centered" (4%).
The survey of 1,015 adults, taken by land line and cellphone May 29-31, has a margin of error of +/– 3 percentage points.
Like the Democrats or not, there was a broad consensus about who speaks for the party. Obama was named by 58%. He was followed by 11% who cited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 3% who cited Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Twenty-one percent couldn't come up with a name.
And Obama's popularity — 67% had a favorable opinion of him — is boosting his party. Even the 14-year-old daughter of Rollins, the Republican strategist, has put up posters of the president in her bedroom.
Some analysts say a stumble by the president and the Democrat-controlled Congress would give Republicans their best opportunity to recover.
"Republicans are counting on the Obama administration to disintegrate, to disappoint, very rapidly and very spectacularly, and a big popular movement of unhappiness with the administration to coalesce," says David Frum, a speechwriter in the Bush White House.
Frum, who says the party hasn't yet come to terms with its problems, has launched a website called newmajority.com to encourage a debate.
"There's a lot of time and nothing wrong with the Republican Party that health care reform or the cap-and-trade (energy plan) or something like that blowing up wouldn't help fix," Cook says.
At the moment, though, "Republicans are going through a wilderness period, and it may take a while to come out of it."
SUSAN PAGE - USA Today.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
MAUREEN DOWD Can The One Have Fun?
The fun police are patrolling Pennsylvania Avenue.
Given the serious times, the chatter goes, should Barack Obama be allowed to enjoy date night with Michelle in New York, sightseeing in Paris, golf outings in D.C., not to mention doing a promotion for Conan O’Brien and a video cameo for Stephen Colbert’s first comedy show from Iraq?
With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” the former president explained later. “I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Actually, what sends the wrong signal is going to war with a phony justification, inadequate troop levels, insufficient armor, an inept Defense secretary and an inability to admit for years, deadly ones, that you needed counterinsurgency experts.
The right signal is Michelle and her daughters being charming ambassadors, “gobsmacking” the town, as a British tabloid put it, by scarfing down fish and chips at a London pub for £7.95 (about $13), like regular tourists.
As a taxpayer, I am most happy to contribute to domestic and international date nights. As Arthur Schlesinger noted in his diaries, the White House tends to drive its occupants nuts. So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world.
Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play on Broadway was too showy. Others thought it helped show a softer side of the often dispassionate Obama.
Interestingly, Dr. No, Dick Cheney, declined to tut-tut with other Republicans, saying “I don’t know why not,” when he was asked about the propriety of the president’s getaway to Broadway. A far more mature response than Senator Chuck Grassley’s nit-twit tweets grumbling about the president urging progress on health care “while u sightseeing in Paris.”
I loved the “Pretty Woman” romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived an entitled life where he could afford such lavish gestures, throwing off his tie and whisking his wife, in a flirty black cocktail dress, to sip martinis in Manhattan, as Sasha hung over a White House balcony and called out goodbye.
When the president and first lady walked to their seats in the Belasco for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the theater-goers went nuts. And why not?
What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.
It was lame of critics on Capitol Hill to carp that the Obamas could have taken in a play in D.C. I’m a native, but it’s not the same. And it’s nice to see them tending to their marriage. According to Richard Wolffe in “Renegade,” his new book about the Obama campaign, it has taken effort to get the relationship this strong.
“She hated the failed race for Congress in 2000, and their marriage was strained by the time their youngest daughter, Sasha, was born a year later,” Wolffe writes. “There was little conversation and even less romance. She was angry at his selfishness and careerism; he thought she was cold and ungrateful. Even as he ran for the United States Senate in 2004, she still harbored very mixed feelings about her husband’s love of politics. ... So she had played no part in Barack’s previous contests and preferred to keep her distance.”
Wolffe limns what those of us who traveled with Obama could see: He was often grumpy on the campaign. He missed his family. He disdained what he saw as superficial, point-scoring conventions of politics, like debates and macho put-downs and public noshing. The Chicago smarty-pants was a Michael Jordan clutch player who grew bored if he was not challenged.
Being president, by contrast, suits him much better. He has not lapsed into his old ambivalence. He is intellectually engaged by sculpting history. The trellis of hideous problems is a challenge that lures him to be powerfully concentrated. And, as his aides say, he loves living above the family store.
Mixing play with intense work is not only a good mental health strategy; it’s a good way to show the world that American confidence and cool — and Cary Grant romantic flair — still thrive.
Date on and tee it up, Mr. President. It’s O.K. if they’re teed off.
Given the serious times, the chatter goes, should Barack Obama be allowed to enjoy date night with Michelle in New York, sightseeing in Paris, golf outings in D.C., not to mention doing a promotion for Conan O’Brien and a video cameo for Stephen Colbert’s first comedy show from Iraq?
With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn’t the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.’s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” the former president explained later. “I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Actually, what sends the wrong signal is going to war with a phony justification, inadequate troop levels, insufficient armor, an inept Defense secretary and an inability to admit for years, deadly ones, that you needed counterinsurgency experts.
The right signal is Michelle and her daughters being charming ambassadors, “gobsmacking” the town, as a British tabloid put it, by scarfing down fish and chips at a London pub for £7.95 (about $13), like regular tourists.
As a taxpayer, I am most happy to contribute to domestic and international date nights. As Arthur Schlesinger noted in his diaries, the White House tends to drive its occupants nuts. So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world.
Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play on Broadway was too showy. Others thought it helped show a softer side of the often dispassionate Obama.
Interestingly, Dr. No, Dick Cheney, declined to tut-tut with other Republicans, saying “I don’t know why not,” when he was asked about the propriety of the president’s getaway to Broadway. A far more mature response than Senator Chuck Grassley’s nit-twit tweets grumbling about the president urging progress on health care “while u sightseeing in Paris.”
I loved the “Pretty Woman” romance of the New York tableau, the president, who had not lived an entitled life where he could afford such lavish gestures, throwing off his tie and whisking his wife, in a flirty black cocktail dress, to sip martinis in Manhattan, as Sasha hung over a White House balcony and called out goodbye.
When the president and first lady walked to their seats in the Belasco for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the theater-goers went nuts. And why not?
What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.
It was lame of critics on Capitol Hill to carp that the Obamas could have taken in a play in D.C. I’m a native, but it’s not the same. And it’s nice to see them tending to their marriage. According to Richard Wolffe in “Renegade,” his new book about the Obama campaign, it has taken effort to get the relationship this strong.
“She hated the failed race for Congress in 2000, and their marriage was strained by the time their youngest daughter, Sasha, was born a year later,” Wolffe writes. “There was little conversation and even less romance. She was angry at his selfishness and careerism; he thought she was cold and ungrateful. Even as he ran for the United States Senate in 2004, she still harbored very mixed feelings about her husband’s love of politics. ... So she had played no part in Barack’s previous contests and preferred to keep her distance.”
Wolffe limns what those of us who traveled with Obama could see: He was often grumpy on the campaign. He missed his family. He disdained what he saw as superficial, point-scoring conventions of politics, like debates and macho put-downs and public noshing. The Chicago smarty-pants was a Michael Jordan clutch player who grew bored if he was not challenged.
Being president, by contrast, suits him much better. He has not lapsed into his old ambivalence. He is intellectually engaged by sculpting history. The trellis of hideous problems is a challenge that lures him to be powerfully concentrated. And, as his aides say, he loves living above the family store.
Mixing play with intense work is not only a good mental health strategy; it’s a good way to show the world that American confidence and cool — and Cary Grant romantic flair — still thrive.
Date on and tee it up, Mr. President. It’s O.K. if they’re teed off.
Auto plan hits potholes
LAWMAKERS WANT TO OVER MANAGE THE AUTO INDUSTRY!
Pork! Micro managers?
VOTE against any Reps who vote FOR restricting auto dealers from closings!
There are just too many with sales down and brands eliminated. Hk
Auto plan hits potholes
President Obama’s plan to save GM and Chrysler through forced bankruptcy got blindsided on Monday by the other two branches of the federal government.
On Monday afternoon the Supreme Court agreed to delay the sale of Chrysler’s assets to Italian carmaker Fiat in order to further consider the argument of three Indiana bondholders who claim they were shortchanged by the prepackaged bankruptcy organized by the Obama administration.
But the court decision was only the half of it. On Capitol Hill, hundreds of lawmakers threw another wrench into the works when they formally asked the Obama administration to get Chrysler and General Motors to put the brakes on plans to close hundreds of local dealerships across the country.
The Supreme Court will now consider, in closed session, whether or not to grant a hearing to the Indiana bondholders. Four justices would have to vote to hear the bondholders’ appeal of a federal court ruling approving the sale.
A spokesman for the Supreme Court said late Monday that the justices could meet anytime to determine whether or not to grant a writ of certiorari, or order oral arguments on the issue.
The court’s action creates a test for Obama, whose Auto Task Force worked to structure a deal between Fiat, Chrysler, organized labor and Chrysler’s debt holders before the company filed for bankruptcy.
A senior administration official downplayed the court’s action.
“We understand this to be an administrative extension designed to allow sufficient time for the Court to make a determination on the merits of the request for a stay,” the official said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers took the matter into their own hands with a strongly worded letter to the president, arguing against the closing of dealerships.
At the same time that the letter, from over 100 House members — the lion’s share of whom were Democrats — was traveling from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, two Democratic freshmen introduced legislation that would force the bankrupt car companies to abandon their plans for mass dealership closings.
That bill, introduced by Reps. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.) and Frank Kratovil (D-Md.), had a list of original co-sponsors that was “growing by the minute” as members were racing back to Washington on Monday afternoon, according to a spokeswoman for Maffei.
In a sign of just how serious members have gotten about preventing the closings, the letter to Obama was spearheaded by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), while the legislation was shepherded by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of House Democrats’ reelection efforts.
“Closing these dealerships will put over 100,000 jobs at risk at a time when our country is shedding jobs at an alarming rate,” Hoyer and a significant portion of the Democratic Caucus wrote to the president. “We also question the criteria being used to determine which dealerships should be closed and the fundamental fairness involved in this effort.
“It is our view that the market should make these decisions rather than leaving it up to the manufacturers whose poor leadership contributed to their demise,” they wrote.
The White House did not have an immediate reaction to the letter.
Maffei and Kratovil’s legislation would seem to take the ball out of Obama’s court altogether, though, by forcing the government-backed auto companies to halt the closing of dealerships, a process that the bill sponsors criticized as “arbitrary.”
“Forced, arbitrary closure of dealers by manufacturers will not necessarily be financially beneficial to automakers, and it certainly will not help the local economies where dealers are integral to the business community,” Maffei said in a statement.
The efforts from lawmakers on Monday point to the perilous line the administration must walk in trying to save companies responsible for millions of American jobs. The government’s intervention is having the effect of forcing those companies to enact necessary cost-saving measures that threaten jobs in hundreds of backyards across the country.
Just last week, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the powerful chairman of the Financial Services Committee, was able to get GM to undo a planned parts distribution center closure in his district.
Frank’s staff said the lawmaker spoke with GM CEO Fritz Henderson and convinced him to keep the Norton, Mass., plant open for at least 14 months.
When GM announced its post-bankruptcy plan last week, it noted that plants in at least 12 congressional districts would be on the chopping block.
So far, though, only Frank has been successful in getting a local plant saved. But other fights are already brewing.
Yet the dealer network presents a much more significant political problem for the former auto giants and for Obama’s Auto Task Force.
“There’s not a congressional district that doesn’t have a car dealership in it somewhere,” said a Democratic aide.
That fact was reflected in the signatures placed on the letter to Obama, which came from representatives from Hawaii to Maine, from urban and rural areas, and from safe and vulnerable districts alike.
Critics of the dealership-closing plan argue that the goal of the auto bailout should be the creation of jobs, not the elimination of them. They further argued that the absence of enough dealers to sell GM and Chrysler vehicles will hamper their efforts to return to profitability.
“Our efforts to revitalize the auto industry in America must include a vibrant dealer network to sell and service first-rate GM and Chrysler products,” said Van Hollen, who signed the letter to Obama and backed Maffei and Kratovil’s bill. “These small businesses employ hundreds of thousands of people and are an integral part of local communities all across this nation.”
Michael O’Brien contributed to this article.
Pork! Micro managers?
VOTE against any Reps who vote FOR restricting auto dealers from closings!
There are just too many with sales down and brands eliminated. Hk
Auto plan hits potholes
President Obama’s plan to save GM and Chrysler through forced bankruptcy got blindsided on Monday by the other two branches of the federal government.
On Monday afternoon the Supreme Court agreed to delay the sale of Chrysler’s assets to Italian carmaker Fiat in order to further consider the argument of three Indiana bondholders who claim they were shortchanged by the prepackaged bankruptcy organized by the Obama administration.
But the court decision was only the half of it. On Capitol Hill, hundreds of lawmakers threw another wrench into the works when they formally asked the Obama administration to get Chrysler and General Motors to put the brakes on plans to close hundreds of local dealerships across the country.
The Supreme Court will now consider, in closed session, whether or not to grant a hearing to the Indiana bondholders. Four justices would have to vote to hear the bondholders’ appeal of a federal court ruling approving the sale.
A spokesman for the Supreme Court said late Monday that the justices could meet anytime to determine whether or not to grant a writ of certiorari, or order oral arguments on the issue.
The court’s action creates a test for Obama, whose Auto Task Force worked to structure a deal between Fiat, Chrysler, organized labor and Chrysler’s debt holders before the company filed for bankruptcy.
A senior administration official downplayed the court’s action.
“We understand this to be an administrative extension designed to allow sufficient time for the Court to make a determination on the merits of the request for a stay,” the official said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers took the matter into their own hands with a strongly worded letter to the president, arguing against the closing of dealerships.
At the same time that the letter, from over 100 House members — the lion’s share of whom were Democrats — was traveling from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, two Democratic freshmen introduced legislation that would force the bankrupt car companies to abandon their plans for mass dealership closings.
That bill, introduced by Reps. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.) and Frank Kratovil (D-Md.), had a list of original co-sponsors that was “growing by the minute” as members were racing back to Washington on Monday afternoon, according to a spokeswoman for Maffei.
In a sign of just how serious members have gotten about preventing the closings, the letter to Obama was spearheaded by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), while the legislation was shepherded by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of House Democrats’ reelection efforts.
“Closing these dealerships will put over 100,000 jobs at risk at a time when our country is shedding jobs at an alarming rate,” Hoyer and a significant portion of the Democratic Caucus wrote to the president. “We also question the criteria being used to determine which dealerships should be closed and the fundamental fairness involved in this effort.
“It is our view that the market should make these decisions rather than leaving it up to the manufacturers whose poor leadership contributed to their demise,” they wrote.
The White House did not have an immediate reaction to the letter.
Maffei and Kratovil’s legislation would seem to take the ball out of Obama’s court altogether, though, by forcing the government-backed auto companies to halt the closing of dealerships, a process that the bill sponsors criticized as “arbitrary.”
“Forced, arbitrary closure of dealers by manufacturers will not necessarily be financially beneficial to automakers, and it certainly will not help the local economies where dealers are integral to the business community,” Maffei said in a statement.
The efforts from lawmakers on Monday point to the perilous line the administration must walk in trying to save companies responsible for millions of American jobs. The government’s intervention is having the effect of forcing those companies to enact necessary cost-saving measures that threaten jobs in hundreds of backyards across the country.
Just last week, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the powerful chairman of the Financial Services Committee, was able to get GM to undo a planned parts distribution center closure in his district.
Frank’s staff said the lawmaker spoke with GM CEO Fritz Henderson and convinced him to keep the Norton, Mass., plant open for at least 14 months.
When GM announced its post-bankruptcy plan last week, it noted that plants in at least 12 congressional districts would be on the chopping block.
So far, though, only Frank has been successful in getting a local plant saved. But other fights are already brewing.
Yet the dealer network presents a much more significant political problem for the former auto giants and for Obama’s Auto Task Force.
“There’s not a congressional district that doesn’t have a car dealership in it somewhere,” said a Democratic aide.
That fact was reflected in the signatures placed on the letter to Obama, which came from representatives from Hawaii to Maine, from urban and rural areas, and from safe and vulnerable districts alike.
Critics of the dealership-closing plan argue that the goal of the auto bailout should be the creation of jobs, not the elimination of them. They further argued that the absence of enough dealers to sell GM and Chrysler vehicles will hamper their efforts to return to profitability.
“Our efforts to revitalize the auto industry in America must include a vibrant dealer network to sell and service first-rate GM and Chrysler products,” said Van Hollen, who signed the letter to Obama and backed Maffei and Kratovil’s bill. “These small businesses employ hundreds of thousands of people and are an integral part of local communities all across this nation.”
Michael O’Brien contributed to this article.
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