PROMISES, PROMISES: Friday is still WH 'trash day' SHARON THEIMER APNews
President Barack Obama entered the White House promising a new era of openness in government, but when it comes to bad news, his administration often uses one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook: putting it out when the fewest people are likely to notice.
Former White House environmental adviser Van Jones' resignation over controversial comments hit the trifecta of below-the-radar timing: The White House announced the departure overnight on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when few journalists were on duty and few Americans awake, much less paying attention to the news.
As with past administrations, Friday looks like a popular day to "take out the trash," as presidential aides on the TV drama "The West Wing" matter-of-factly called it. Along with weekends, holidays and the dark of night, the final stretch of the work week, when many news consumers tune out, is a common time for the government to release news unlikely to benefit the president.
When he took office, Obama pledged in a memo to agency chiefs to create "an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration." But as his predecessors demonstrated, openness is a relative thing. Bad news can be hidden in plain sight.
Among recent examples: On Friday, Nov. 13, the Obama administration announced it would put the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on trial in civilian court in New York. It also disclosed the resignation of the top White House lawyer, who had taken blame for some of the problems surrounding the administration's planned closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The following Friday, Nov. 20, saw the Justice Department quietly notifying a court that it intended to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against a Blackwater Worldwide security guard involved in a 2007 Baghdad shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead. The court filing was sealed from public view and submitted without ceremony, in contrast to the Monday last December when the charges were announced. Then, the Justice Department held a noon news conference and put out a lengthy press release.
On previous Fridays, the White House acknowledged it may not be able to close the Guantanamo prison by January as the president promised, announced Obama was imposing punitive tariffs on car and light-truck tires from China, and disclosed that Obama had waived conflict-of-interest rules for several aides.
It all shows how timing can be used to obscure, if not totally hide, news that detracts from a president's main message.
"It's a time-honored practice where the president's trying to talk about what he wants to talk about and push the subjects that maybe he doesn't want to talk as much about into a time when people aren't paying as much attention," said Dee Dee Myers, press secretary during Clinton's first two years in office and a consultant for "The West Wing" "trash day" episode.
If Friday is a prime day to dump potentially unfavorable news in Washington, 5 p.m. is the witching hour.
The day before Halloween, the Obama administration slipped out news on several ongoing issues, much of it in late afternoon or evening. It included developments on warrantless wiretapping, terror interrogations, the CIA leak case, the reliability of the government's stimulus job creation figures, lobbyists and other visitors to the White House, and the Securities and Exchange Commission's failure to detect disgraced financier Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme for years.
"The president has taken and will continue to take wide-ranging and unprecedented steps to fulfill his campaign promise to give Americans firsthand access to information about their government at whitehouse.gov," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, when asked whether dropping important news late on Fridays, when few news consumers are paying attention, squares with the president's promise of transparency. "The First Amendment to the Constitution ensures that the media is independently responsible for how and when that information is covered."
Earnest noted that Obama is the first president to routinely release visitor logs, and that while the White House did decide to put them out on Fridays, it moved up the disclosure to Wednesday last week rather than do it the day after Thanksgiving. Of the Madoff example, he said the SEC is an independent agency and makes its own decisions about when to release information.
Obama is far from the only president to make major news at the tail end of, or outside, normal business hours.
President George H.W. Bush granted Christmas Eve pardons in 1992 to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and several others in the Iran-Contra arms scandal.
Fridays saw many Iran-Contra scandal developments during Ronald Reagan's presidency, including the resignation of White House chief of staff Donald Regan. And Friday was a common day for President George W. Bush's administration to release documents in a scandal over U.S. attorney firings.
The "trash day" episode of "The West Wing" was patterned on a Friday heading into the July 4 holiday weekend when the Clinton White House dumped several stories, Myers said.
In Obama's case, releasing voluminous sets of documents and data late on Fridays, such as White House visitor records and stimulus job figures, isn't "anti-transparency" because they're still making the documents available, she said.
"But yes, do you try to manage the flow of information to some degree at the White House? Of course. You'd be a fool not to," Myers said.
Though the tactic of intentionally dumping some news at off-times persists, it doesn't always work, said Myers and Lanny Davis, a crisis management attorney in Washington and former special counsel to Clinton.
"If it's a really bad story it will have its own legs and you're probably not accomplishing all that much," Davis said. "Sometimes all you're accomplishing is irritating reporters."
Davis points to a famous episode involving President Richard Nixon as an example of weekend timing failing to minimize impact. In an incident known as the "Saturday night massacre," Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox was fired on Nixon's orders on a Saturday night in 1973, hours after Cox held a news conference to defy him. The Justice Department's top two officials resigned rather than be the ones to dismiss Cox.
"It didn't exactly help Nixon to do it on a Saturday night," Davis said. "Only, he gave us all a memorable historic expression. The 'Wednesday night massacre' doesn't sound as good as the 'Saturday night massacre.'"
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Crazy about guns BUT at what price?
LATimes editorial 12-01-09
Tragic shootings like those in Washington show the deadly side of our love affair with firepower.
News that an armed fugitive who shot and killed four police officers near Seattle on Sunday was still at large prompted fear, anger, sorrow and something else: The desire to grab a gun. "I can tell you that most people have probably got their weapons loaded right now," a retired computer worker from Parkland, Wash., told The Times. "I think people should carry their guns and be ready," a local taxi driver told National Public Radio.
It's a typical American response to an all-too-typical American incident of gun violence. It is also a striking example of the disconnect between our desire to feel safe and our insistence on loose gun laws that make us less so. The murdered officers were armed, well trained in the use of their weapons and wearing bulletproof vests. It didn't save them.
Americans seem hard-wired to love guns; our frontier history and our bloody split from the British crown have made gun ownership both a cultural imperative and a constitutionally enshrined right. That's not going to change any time soon, and polls show that's OK with increasing numbers of Americans. But we pay a steep price for our fascination with firepower.
Had Sunday's victims been, say, Mounties, it wouldn't necessarily have sent Canadians scrambling for the gun racks. But then, such killings are far less common in Canada. According to the FBI, the U.S. homicide rate in 2008 was 5.4 for every 100,000 people; 67% of those killings were committed with guns. In Canada, the homicide rate was 1.8 per 100,000, with 33% of the killings committed with guns. Notice a pattern? Canada has stricter guns laws than the United States, requiring owners to pass a safety course and get a license before buying a gun, rather like drivers must do here. The need for a driver's license seems obvious to most Americans -- after all, a car with an untrained driver behind the wheel can be deadly.
Time will tell how the suspected shooter in Parkland got his weapon. If he stole it or acquired it from an accomplice, there are few gun laws that could have prevented the tragedy short of a blanket ban on handguns, and the Supreme Court last year ruled that Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban was unconstitutional. Yet regardless of the circumstances in Parkland, it is simple for criminals and the mentally unstable to acquire guns in this country. In most states (though not, thankfully, California) they need only go to a gun show and buy from a reseller, because dealers in second-hand firearms usually aren't required to perform a federal background check.
That "gun-show loophole" should have been closed years ago because it would protect the public while doing nothing to restrict law-abiding citizens' right to bear arms, but the gun lobby has successfully resisted every attempt at reform. Americans could stand to be less gun-crazy and more willing to stop crazy people from getting guns.
Tragic shootings like those in Washington show the deadly side of our love affair with firepower.
News that an armed fugitive who shot and killed four police officers near Seattle on Sunday was still at large prompted fear, anger, sorrow and something else: The desire to grab a gun. "I can tell you that most people have probably got their weapons loaded right now," a retired computer worker from Parkland, Wash., told The Times. "I think people should carry their guns and be ready," a local taxi driver told National Public Radio.
It's a typical American response to an all-too-typical American incident of gun violence. It is also a striking example of the disconnect between our desire to feel safe and our insistence on loose gun laws that make us less so. The murdered officers were armed, well trained in the use of their weapons and wearing bulletproof vests. It didn't save them.
Americans seem hard-wired to love guns; our frontier history and our bloody split from the British crown have made gun ownership both a cultural imperative and a constitutionally enshrined right. That's not going to change any time soon, and polls show that's OK with increasing numbers of Americans. But we pay a steep price for our fascination with firepower.
Had Sunday's victims been, say, Mounties, it wouldn't necessarily have sent Canadians scrambling for the gun racks. But then, such killings are far less common in Canada. According to the FBI, the U.S. homicide rate in 2008 was 5.4 for every 100,000 people; 67% of those killings were committed with guns. In Canada, the homicide rate was 1.8 per 100,000, with 33% of the killings committed with guns. Notice a pattern? Canada has stricter guns laws than the United States, requiring owners to pass a safety course and get a license before buying a gun, rather like drivers must do here. The need for a driver's license seems obvious to most Americans -- after all, a car with an untrained driver behind the wheel can be deadly.
Time will tell how the suspected shooter in Parkland got his weapon. If he stole it or acquired it from an accomplice, there are few gun laws that could have prevented the tragedy short of a blanket ban on handguns, and the Supreme Court last year ruled that Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban was unconstitutional. Yet regardless of the circumstances in Parkland, it is simple for criminals and the mentally unstable to acquire guns in this country. In most states (though not, thankfully, California) they need only go to a gun show and buy from a reseller, because dealers in second-hand firearms usually aren't required to perform a federal background check.
That "gun-show loophole" should have been closed years ago because it would protect the public while doing nothing to restrict law-abiding citizens' right to bear arms, but the gun lobby has successfully resisted every attempt at reform. Americans could stand to be less gun-crazy and more willing to stop crazy people from getting guns.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Politico SEVEN OBAMA QUESTIONS worth reading
7 stories Obama doesn't want told John F. Harris
Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.
No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.
A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.
The Obama White House argues that all of these storylines are inaccurate or unfair. In some cases these anti-Obama narratives are fanned by Republicans, in some cases by reporters and commentators.
But they all are serious threats to Obama, if they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame through which people interpret the president’s actions and motives.
Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about:
He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money
Economists and business leaders from across the ideological spectrum were urging the new president on last winter when he signed onto more than a trillion in stimulus spending and bank and auto bailouts during his first weeks in office. Many, though far from all, of these same people now agree that these actions helped avert an even worse financial catastrophe.
Along the way, however, it is clear Obama underestimated the political consequences that flow from the perception that he is a profligate spender. He also misjudged the anger in middle America about bailouts with weak and sporadic public explanations of why he believed they were necessary.
The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.
Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.
Too much Leonard Nimoy
People used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s misty-eyed, raspy-voiced claims that, “I feel your pain.”
The reality, however, is that Clinton’s dozen years as governor before becoming president really did leave him with a vivid sense of the concrete human dimensions of policy. He did not view programs as abstractions — he viewed them in terms of actual people he knew by name.
Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.
Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.
That’s the Chicago Way
This is a storyline that’s likely taken root more firmly in Washington than around the country. The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols.
It does not help that many West Wing aides seem to relish an image of themselves as shrewd, brass-knuckled political types. In a Washington Post story this month, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, referring to most of Obama’s team, said, “We are all campaign hacks.”
The problem is that many voters took Obama seriously in 2008 when he talked about wanting to create a more reasoned, non-partisan style of governance in Washington. When Republicans showed scant interest in cooperating with Obama at the start, the Obama West Wing gladly reverted to campaign hack mode.
The examples of Chicago-style politics include their delight in public battles with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (There was also a semi-public campaign of leaks aimed at Greg Craig, the White House counsel who fell out of favor.) In private, the Obama team cut an early deal — to the distaste of many congressional Democrats — that gave favorable terms to the pharmaceutical lobby in exchange for their backing his health care plans.
The lesson that many Washington insiders have drawn is that Obama wants to buy off the people he can and bowl over those he can’t. If that perception spreads beyond Washington this will scuff Obama’s brand as a new style of political leader.
He’s a pushover
If you are going to be known as a fighter, you might as well reap the benefits. But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.
It seems a bit contradictory, to be sure. But it’s a perception that began when Obama several times laid down lines — then let people cross them with seeming impunity. Last summer he told Democrats they better not go home for recess until a critical health care vote but they blew him off. He told the Israeli government he wanted a freeze in settlements but no one took him seriously. Even Fox News — which his aides prominently said should not be treated like a real news organization — then got interview time for its White House correspondent.
In truth, most of these episodes do not amount to much. But this unflattering storyline would take a more serious turn if Obama is seen as unable to deliver on his stern warnings in the escalating conflict with Iran over its nuclear program.
He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe
That line belonged to George H.W. Bush, excoriating Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But it highlights a continuing reality: In presidential politics the safe ground has always been to be an American exceptionalist.
Politicians of both parties have embraced the idea that this country — because of its power and/or the hand of Providence — should be a singular force in the world. It would be hugely unwelcome for Obama if the perception took root that he is comfortable with a relative decline in U.S. influence or position in the world.
On this score, the reviews of Obama’s recent Asia trip were harsh.
His peculiar bow to the emperor of Japan was symbolic. But his lots-of-velvet, not-much-iron approach to China had substantive implications.
On the left, the budding storyline is that Obama has retreated from human rights in the name of cynical realism. On the right, it is that he is more interested in being President of the World than President of the United States, a critique that will be heard more in December as he stops in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize and then in Copenhagen for an international summit on curbing greenhouse gases.
President Pelosi
No figure in Barack Obama’s Washington, including Obama, has had more success in advancing his will than the speaker of the House, despite public approval ratings that hover in the range of Dick Cheney’s. With a mix of tough party discipline and shrewd vote-counting, she passed a version of the stimulus bill largely written by congressional Democrats, passed climate legislation, and passed her chamber’s version of health care reform. She and anti-war liberals in her caucus are clearly affecting the White House’s Afghanistan calculations.
The great hazard for Obama is if Republicans or journalists conclude — as some already have — that Pelosi’s achievements are more impressive than Obama’s or come at his expense.
This conclusion seems premature, especially with the final chapter of the health care drama yet to be written.
But it is clear that Obama has allowed the speaker to become more nearly an equal — and far from a subordinate — than many of his predecessors of both parties would have thought wise.
He’s in love with the man in the mirror
No one becomes president without a fair share of what the French call amour propre. Does Obama have more than his share of self-regard?
It’s a common theme of Washington buzz that Obama is over-exposed. He gives interviews on his sports obsessions to ESPN, cracks wise with Leno and Letterman, discusses his fitness with Men’s Health, discusses his marriage in a joint interview with first lady Michelle Obama for The New York Times. A photo the other day caught him leaving the White House clutching a copy of GQ featuring himself.
White House aides say making Obama widely available is the right strategy for communicating with Americans in an era of highly fragmented media.
But, as the novelty of a new president wears off, the Obama cult of personality risks coming off as mere vanity unless it is harnessed to tangible achievements.
That is why the next couple of months — with health care and Afghanistan jostling at center stage — will likely carry a long echo. Obama’s best hope of nipping bad storylines is to replace them with good ones rooted in public perceptions of his effectiveness.
Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.
No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.
A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.
The Obama White House argues that all of these storylines are inaccurate or unfair. In some cases these anti-Obama narratives are fanned by Republicans, in some cases by reporters and commentators.
But they all are serious threats to Obama, if they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame through which people interpret the president’s actions and motives.
Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about:
He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money
Economists and business leaders from across the ideological spectrum were urging the new president on last winter when he signed onto more than a trillion in stimulus spending and bank and auto bailouts during his first weeks in office. Many, though far from all, of these same people now agree that these actions helped avert an even worse financial catastrophe.
Along the way, however, it is clear Obama underestimated the political consequences that flow from the perception that he is a profligate spender. He also misjudged the anger in middle America about bailouts with weak and sporadic public explanations of why he believed they were necessary.
The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.
Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.
Too much Leonard Nimoy
People used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s misty-eyed, raspy-voiced claims that, “I feel your pain.”
The reality, however, is that Clinton’s dozen years as governor before becoming president really did leave him with a vivid sense of the concrete human dimensions of policy. He did not view programs as abstractions — he viewed them in terms of actual people he knew by name.
Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.
Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.
That’s the Chicago Way
This is a storyline that’s likely taken root more firmly in Washington than around the country. The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols.
It does not help that many West Wing aides seem to relish an image of themselves as shrewd, brass-knuckled political types. In a Washington Post story this month, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, referring to most of Obama’s team, said, “We are all campaign hacks.”
The problem is that many voters took Obama seriously in 2008 when he talked about wanting to create a more reasoned, non-partisan style of governance in Washington. When Republicans showed scant interest in cooperating with Obama at the start, the Obama West Wing gladly reverted to campaign hack mode.
The examples of Chicago-style politics include their delight in public battles with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (There was also a semi-public campaign of leaks aimed at Greg Craig, the White House counsel who fell out of favor.) In private, the Obama team cut an early deal — to the distaste of many congressional Democrats — that gave favorable terms to the pharmaceutical lobby in exchange for their backing his health care plans.
The lesson that many Washington insiders have drawn is that Obama wants to buy off the people he can and bowl over those he can’t. If that perception spreads beyond Washington this will scuff Obama’s brand as a new style of political leader.
He’s a pushover
If you are going to be known as a fighter, you might as well reap the benefits. But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.
It seems a bit contradictory, to be sure. But it’s a perception that began when Obama several times laid down lines — then let people cross them with seeming impunity. Last summer he told Democrats they better not go home for recess until a critical health care vote but they blew him off. He told the Israeli government he wanted a freeze in settlements but no one took him seriously. Even Fox News — which his aides prominently said should not be treated like a real news organization — then got interview time for its White House correspondent.
In truth, most of these episodes do not amount to much. But this unflattering storyline would take a more serious turn if Obama is seen as unable to deliver on his stern warnings in the escalating conflict with Iran over its nuclear program.
He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe
That line belonged to George H.W. Bush, excoriating Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But it highlights a continuing reality: In presidential politics the safe ground has always been to be an American exceptionalist.
Politicians of both parties have embraced the idea that this country — because of its power and/or the hand of Providence — should be a singular force in the world. It would be hugely unwelcome for Obama if the perception took root that he is comfortable with a relative decline in U.S. influence or position in the world.
On this score, the reviews of Obama’s recent Asia trip were harsh.
His peculiar bow to the emperor of Japan was symbolic. But his lots-of-velvet, not-much-iron approach to China had substantive implications.
On the left, the budding storyline is that Obama has retreated from human rights in the name of cynical realism. On the right, it is that he is more interested in being President of the World than President of the United States, a critique that will be heard more in December as he stops in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize and then in Copenhagen for an international summit on curbing greenhouse gases.
President Pelosi
No figure in Barack Obama’s Washington, including Obama, has had more success in advancing his will than the speaker of the House, despite public approval ratings that hover in the range of Dick Cheney’s. With a mix of tough party discipline and shrewd vote-counting, she passed a version of the stimulus bill largely written by congressional Democrats, passed climate legislation, and passed her chamber’s version of health care reform. She and anti-war liberals in her caucus are clearly affecting the White House’s Afghanistan calculations.
The great hazard for Obama is if Republicans or journalists conclude — as some already have — that Pelosi’s achievements are more impressive than Obama’s or come at his expense.
This conclusion seems premature, especially with the final chapter of the health care drama yet to be written.
But it is clear that Obama has allowed the speaker to become more nearly an equal — and far from a subordinate — than many of his predecessors of both parties would have thought wise.
He’s in love with the man in the mirror
No one becomes president without a fair share of what the French call amour propre. Does Obama have more than his share of self-regard?
It’s a common theme of Washington buzz that Obama is over-exposed. He gives interviews on his sports obsessions to ESPN, cracks wise with Leno and Letterman, discusses his fitness with Men’s Health, discusses his marriage in a joint interview with first lady Michelle Obama for The New York Times. A photo the other day caught him leaving the White House clutching a copy of GQ featuring himself.
White House aides say making Obama widely available is the right strategy for communicating with Americans in an era of highly fragmented media.
But, as the novelty of a new president wears off, the Obama cult of personality risks coming off as mere vanity unless it is harnessed to tangible achievements.
That is why the next couple of months — with health care and Afghanistan jostling at center stage — will likely carry a long echo. Obama’s best hope of nipping bad storylines is to replace them with good ones rooted in public perceptions of his effectiveness.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Single payer health care best - just ask people who have it!
A recent study found that 90 percent of Canadians support universal, single-payer health care. A poll taken last summer shows 82 percent of Canadians believe their health care system to be better than the US's, despite constant grumbling about waiting times for treatment of non-life-threatening conditions.
Seven issues amending healthcare bill
Seven issues to watch as Senate begins amending healthcare bill
By Jeffrey Young - The Hill
Senators will be asked to cast their votes on numerous amendments as they begin a debate to reshape the country’s healthcare system.
Some amendments will be designed to improve the bill, some to satisfy a special interest or pet peeve. Still others will be presented as poison pills.
Here are seven issues likely to arise during the amendment process.
Public option: An issue that unites Republicans and divides Democrats on ideological grounds inevitably was bound to haunt the Senate Democratic leadership. The notion of creating a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private companies is seen as vital by liberal Democrats but centrists range from skeptical to deeply antagonistic, even though states could opt out.
The best hope for a positive outcome for the Democrats could rest on the chances that liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) along with centrist public option supporter Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) can forge yet another compromise version of the program to satisfy centrists such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who have threatened to filibuster the bill over the public option. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is waiting in the wings with her “trigger” compromise.
Abortion: It wouldn’t be American politics if the forces on both sides of the abortion issue weren’t at loggerheads. The healthcare bill already includes language that is supposed to keep federal dollars away from abortion funding but the Catholic bishops, and Nelson, don’t think it goes far enough. Democratic Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) each voted in committee to beef up the abortion restrictions so their actions on the floor will be key. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) authored the failed committee amendments and is sure to raise objections to the bill on abortion.
Health insurance excise tax: The proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans, a key to raising revenue and reducing long-term healthcare costs according to the Congressional Budget Office, may enjoy support in the White House but many Democrats and labor unions remain staunchly opposed to what they view as a middle-class tax hike. Already scaled down several times – the original idea was to tax the value of all workplace health benefits – Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and others will look to shrink it further, if not eliminate it, but will need to raise additional taxes to make up the difference.
Prescription drugs: The pharmaceutical industry struck a grand bargain this summer with the White House and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to limit its financial exposure from healthcare reform to $85 billion and to support the Democrats’ efforts. That deal has held uneasily since and Democrats are eyeing the chance to take a bite out of a long-time nemesis. Like in the House, Democrats are eager to require larger rebates from pharmaceutical firms who sell drugs to state Medicaid programs and use the additional money to sweeten the Medicare prescription drug benefit. A handful of Republicans such as Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and David Vitter (La.) would likely join, or even start, any effort to permit the import of medicines from abroad.
Affordability: Because almost everyone would be required to obtain health coverage, providing fair and adequate subsidies to low- and middle-income people has presented a challenge for lawmakers trying to keep the bill on budget. Liberal Democrats get more attention when they talk about the public option but they have complained about the subsidy levels almost as much, while Snowe has also been adamant that the bill does too little to ensure insurance is less expensive. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a key swing vote, wants more help for small businesses and the self-employed. Trouble is, every dollar of assistance paid out has to come from somewhere.
Insurance exchanges: The concept of creating an online marketplace where consumers can comparison-shop for healthcare hasn’t been very controversial. But what types of plans people could buy and who will be allowed to buy them has been a point of contention. Democrats will be looking to provide access to the most generous but most affordable plans they can. Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), under an agreement with Reid and Baucus, will offer an amendment to let more people beyond individuals and small-business employees buy insurance on the exchanges. The exchanges wouldn’t launch until 2014, either, so Landrieu and others want to move that date closer.
Medicare cuts: Republicans have railed about the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare contained in the bill though Democrats insist they are seeking to make the program more efficient and are not cutting anyone’s benefits. Because these cuts are essential to financing the rest of the bill, however, they’re here to stay – though some could be scaled back. The deep cuts to private Medicare Advantage plans, for instance, could be mitigated to assuage senators from states with large senior populations. Medical interests from physicians to home healthcare providers will also be seeking concessions.
By Jeffrey Young - The Hill
Senators will be asked to cast their votes on numerous amendments as they begin a debate to reshape the country’s healthcare system.
Some amendments will be designed to improve the bill, some to satisfy a special interest or pet peeve. Still others will be presented as poison pills.
Here are seven issues likely to arise during the amendment process.
Public option: An issue that unites Republicans and divides Democrats on ideological grounds inevitably was bound to haunt the Senate Democratic leadership. The notion of creating a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private companies is seen as vital by liberal Democrats but centrists range from skeptical to deeply antagonistic, even though states could opt out.
The best hope for a positive outcome for the Democrats could rest on the chances that liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) along with centrist public option supporter Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) can forge yet another compromise version of the program to satisfy centrists such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who have threatened to filibuster the bill over the public option. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is waiting in the wings with her “trigger” compromise.
Abortion: It wouldn’t be American politics if the forces on both sides of the abortion issue weren’t at loggerheads. The healthcare bill already includes language that is supposed to keep federal dollars away from abortion funding but the Catholic bishops, and Nelson, don’t think it goes far enough. Democratic Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) each voted in committee to beef up the abortion restrictions so their actions on the floor will be key. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) authored the failed committee amendments and is sure to raise objections to the bill on abortion.
Health insurance excise tax: The proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans, a key to raising revenue and reducing long-term healthcare costs according to the Congressional Budget Office, may enjoy support in the White House but many Democrats and labor unions remain staunchly opposed to what they view as a middle-class tax hike. Already scaled down several times – the original idea was to tax the value of all workplace health benefits – Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and others will look to shrink it further, if not eliminate it, but will need to raise additional taxes to make up the difference.
Prescription drugs: The pharmaceutical industry struck a grand bargain this summer with the White House and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to limit its financial exposure from healthcare reform to $85 billion and to support the Democrats’ efforts. That deal has held uneasily since and Democrats are eyeing the chance to take a bite out of a long-time nemesis. Like in the House, Democrats are eager to require larger rebates from pharmaceutical firms who sell drugs to state Medicaid programs and use the additional money to sweeten the Medicare prescription drug benefit. A handful of Republicans such as Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and David Vitter (La.) would likely join, or even start, any effort to permit the import of medicines from abroad.
Affordability: Because almost everyone would be required to obtain health coverage, providing fair and adequate subsidies to low- and middle-income people has presented a challenge for lawmakers trying to keep the bill on budget. Liberal Democrats get more attention when they talk about the public option but they have complained about the subsidy levels almost as much, while Snowe has also been adamant that the bill does too little to ensure insurance is less expensive. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a key swing vote, wants more help for small businesses and the self-employed. Trouble is, every dollar of assistance paid out has to come from somewhere.
Insurance exchanges: The concept of creating an online marketplace where consumers can comparison-shop for healthcare hasn’t been very controversial. But what types of plans people could buy and who will be allowed to buy them has been a point of contention. Democrats will be looking to provide access to the most generous but most affordable plans they can. Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), under an agreement with Reid and Baucus, will offer an amendment to let more people beyond individuals and small-business employees buy insurance on the exchanges. The exchanges wouldn’t launch until 2014, either, so Landrieu and others want to move that date closer.
Medicare cuts: Republicans have railed about the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare contained in the bill though Democrats insist they are seeking to make the program more efficient and are not cutting anyone’s benefits. Because these cuts are essential to financing the rest of the bill, however, they’re here to stay – though some could be scaled back. The deep cuts to private Medicare Advantage plans, for instance, could be mitigated to assuage senators from states with large senior populations. Medical interests from physicians to home healthcare providers will also be seeking concessions.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Who's watching Glenn Beck?
LATimes Tim Rutten
Much like the Depression-era demagogue Father Charles Coughlin, the Fox News personality is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug?
For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League has stared unflinchingly into the dark corners of America's social psyche -- the places where combustible tendencies such as hatred and paranoia pool and, sometimes, burst into flame.
As a Jewish organization, the ADL's first preoccupation naturally is anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has extended its scrutiny to the whole range of bigoted malevolence -- white supremacy, the militia movement, neo-nativism and conspiratorial fantasies in all of their improbable permutations. These days, the organization's research is characterized by the sense of proportion and sobriety that long experience brings.
That makes its recent report on the extremist groups and propagandists that have emerged since President Obama's election -- "Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies" -- particularly notable. For the first time in living memory, the ADL is sounding the alarm about a mainstream media personality: Fox News' Glenn Beck, who also hosts a popular radio show.
The report notes that while "other conservative media hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, routinely attack Obama and his administration, typically on partisan grounds, they have usually dismissed or refused to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists." By contrast, "Beck and his guests have made a habit of demonizing President Obama and promoting conspiracy theories about his administration. ... Beck has even gone so far as to make comparisons between Hitler and Obama."
What gives all of this nonsense an ominous twist is Beck's announcement that he intends to use his TV and radio shows to promote a mass movement that will involve voter registration drives, training in community organizing and a series of regional conventions that will produce a "100-year plan" for America to be read from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a mass rally Aug. 28.
As Beck wrote on his website, "I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting. ... All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding."
Hard times predictably throw up their demagogues. Still, even allowing for the frenetic pace of our wired world's 24-hour news cycle, it's remarkable how quickly the arc of Beck's career has come to resemble that of the Great Depression's uber-demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin. In the months after the crash of '29, Coughlin turned what had been a conventionally religious weekly radio broadcast into a platform for championing the downtrodden working man. He was an early supporter of the New Deal, coining the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin," but quickly turned on the president for a variety of complex ideological and personal reasons. Coughlin flirted with Huey Long, launched an unsuccessful political party, published a popular newspaper, Social Justice, and even inspired and supported a kind of militia, the Christian Front, some of whose members were arrested by the FBI and charged with plotting a fascist coup.
As the 1930s dragged on, Coughlin, a longtime admirer of Francisco Franco, became virulently anti-Semitic, isolationist and pro-German. He also was extraordinarily popular. At their height, his weekly broadcasts attracted more than 40 million listeners. Still, after he lashed out at German Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht, many major urban radio stations dropped his program. Influential American prelates, the Vatican and prominent Catholic New Dealers had worked for some time to persuade Coughlin's superior, the archbishop of Detroit, to silence him. Shortly before the U.S. entered World War II, a new bishop was installed, and Coughlin was ordered to cease broadcasting. He accepted the clerical discipline and retired into a long life of bitter silence.
It's hard to imagine any contemporary cable system dropping Fox News simply because Beck is an offensively dangerous demagogue -- not with his ratings at least. His new foray into politics, though, presents Rupert Murdoch's network with a profound challenge. Is it willing to become the platform for an extremist political campaign, or will it draw a line as even the authoritarian Catholic Church of the 1940s did? CNN recently parted ways with its resident ranter, Lou Dobbs -- who now confirms he's weighing a presidential bid.
Does Fox see a similar problem with Beck -- and, if not, why?
Much like the Depression-era demagogue Father Charles Coughlin, the Fox News personality is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug?
For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League has stared unflinchingly into the dark corners of America's social psyche -- the places where combustible tendencies such as hatred and paranoia pool and, sometimes, burst into flame.
As a Jewish organization, the ADL's first preoccupation naturally is anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has extended its scrutiny to the whole range of bigoted malevolence -- white supremacy, the militia movement, neo-nativism and conspiratorial fantasies in all of their improbable permutations. These days, the organization's research is characterized by the sense of proportion and sobriety that long experience brings.
That makes its recent report on the extremist groups and propagandists that have emerged since President Obama's election -- "Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies" -- particularly notable. For the first time in living memory, the ADL is sounding the alarm about a mainstream media personality: Fox News' Glenn Beck, who also hosts a popular radio show.
The report notes that while "other conservative media hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, routinely attack Obama and his administration, typically on partisan grounds, they have usually dismissed or refused to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists." By contrast, "Beck and his guests have made a habit of demonizing President Obama and promoting conspiracy theories about his administration. ... Beck has even gone so far as to make comparisons between Hitler and Obama."
What gives all of this nonsense an ominous twist is Beck's announcement that he intends to use his TV and radio shows to promote a mass movement that will involve voter registration drives, training in community organizing and a series of regional conventions that will produce a "100-year plan" for America to be read from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a mass rally Aug. 28.
As Beck wrote on his website, "I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting. ... All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding."
Hard times predictably throw up their demagogues. Still, even allowing for the frenetic pace of our wired world's 24-hour news cycle, it's remarkable how quickly the arc of Beck's career has come to resemble that of the Great Depression's uber-demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin. In the months after the crash of '29, Coughlin turned what had been a conventionally religious weekly radio broadcast into a platform for championing the downtrodden working man. He was an early supporter of the New Deal, coining the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin," but quickly turned on the president for a variety of complex ideological and personal reasons. Coughlin flirted with Huey Long, launched an unsuccessful political party, published a popular newspaper, Social Justice, and even inspired and supported a kind of militia, the Christian Front, some of whose members were arrested by the FBI and charged with plotting a fascist coup.
As the 1930s dragged on, Coughlin, a longtime admirer of Francisco Franco, became virulently anti-Semitic, isolationist and pro-German. He also was extraordinarily popular. At their height, his weekly broadcasts attracted more than 40 million listeners. Still, after he lashed out at German Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht, many major urban radio stations dropped his program. Influential American prelates, the Vatican and prominent Catholic New Dealers had worked for some time to persuade Coughlin's superior, the archbishop of Detroit, to silence him. Shortly before the U.S. entered World War II, a new bishop was installed, and Coughlin was ordered to cease broadcasting. He accepted the clerical discipline and retired into a long life of bitter silence.
It's hard to imagine any contemporary cable system dropping Fox News simply because Beck is an offensively dangerous demagogue -- not with his ratings at least. His new foray into politics, though, presents Rupert Murdoch's network with a profound challenge. Is it willing to become the platform for an extremist political campaign, or will it draw a line as even the authoritarian Catholic Church of the 1940s did? CNN recently parted ways with its resident ranter, Lou Dobbs -- who now confirms he's weighing a presidential bid.
Does Fox see a similar problem with Beck -- and, if not, why?
White House defends costs
White House defends costs, cuts in health bill
CHARLES BABINGTON Associated Press
The Obama administration pushed back Wednesday against claims that it's not doing enough to slow the growth of health care costs, a topic senators will debate heavily in coming weeks.
White House budget director Peter Orszag cited economists and analysts who say a pending Senate bill would take several steps in that direction. And Orszag left no doubt that the administration supports a provision disliked by many House Democrats, union activists and others: a new tax on generous health insurance plans offered by employers.
A rival health care bill passed by the House would, instead, place a new surtax on millionaires' incomes. Lawmakers must resolve such differences if Congress is to send a bill to President Barack Obama's desk.
Republicans kept up their criticisms Wednesday, saying the Senate bill would reduce the federal deficit only by raising taxes and cutting Medicare.
The goal is to drive down health care costs, not increase them along with taxes, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said.
"That's not reform," McConnell said.
In a conference call with reporters, Orszag said such critics are overlooking key provisions in the Senate bill. He cited a recent letter from 23 prominent economists praising four main features:
_ Making the federal deficit level or lower over 10 years.
_ Taxing high-cost, employer-provided insurance plans, which are blamed for overuse of medical care.
_ Creating a commission to recommend ways to control Medicare costs.
_ Taking preliminary steps to encourage more efficient ways to deliver health care.
The Senate bill "includes these four pillars," Orszag said.
Previous efforts by Congress to rein in health care costs have done little. For instance, vows to trim Medicare reimbursements to doctors are routinely overturned.
The same has been true for efforts to stop what many consider government overpayments to Medicare Advantage, a privately administered program.
But "it's going to happen this year," said Obama health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle, who also was on the conference call.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the Senate bill would reduce deficits by $130 billion over the next decade. It would do so partly by raising various taxes and by reducing federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other programs by $491 billion over 10 years.
Republicans say such details are lost on many Americans, who might be led to believe the pending legislation would actually reduce overall spending on health care.
"All the Democrats' health care bills will increase costs, slash Medicare and raise taxes," said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.
Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, also criticized the Democratic proposals. She said the Senate bill would increase costs "by encouraging people to wait until they get sick to get insurance, adding new taxes on health care coverage and failing to include systemwide cost-containment provisions."
Ralph G. Neas, head of the Washington-based National Coalition on Health Care, which comprises unions, business groups, patient groups and others, called the House and Senate bills a good start. But Neas urged lawmakers to toughen the bills by including "a strong fail-safe provision" to ensure that segments of the health industry deliver cost savings they have promised.
CHARLES BABINGTON Associated Press
The Obama administration pushed back Wednesday against claims that it's not doing enough to slow the growth of health care costs, a topic senators will debate heavily in coming weeks.
White House budget director Peter Orszag cited economists and analysts who say a pending Senate bill would take several steps in that direction. And Orszag left no doubt that the administration supports a provision disliked by many House Democrats, union activists and others: a new tax on generous health insurance plans offered by employers.
A rival health care bill passed by the House would, instead, place a new surtax on millionaires' incomes. Lawmakers must resolve such differences if Congress is to send a bill to President Barack Obama's desk.
Republicans kept up their criticisms Wednesday, saying the Senate bill would reduce the federal deficit only by raising taxes and cutting Medicare.
The goal is to drive down health care costs, not increase them along with taxes, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said.
"That's not reform," McConnell said.
In a conference call with reporters, Orszag said such critics are overlooking key provisions in the Senate bill. He cited a recent letter from 23 prominent economists praising four main features:
_ Making the federal deficit level or lower over 10 years.
_ Taxing high-cost, employer-provided insurance plans, which are blamed for overuse of medical care.
_ Creating a commission to recommend ways to control Medicare costs.
_ Taking preliminary steps to encourage more efficient ways to deliver health care.
The Senate bill "includes these four pillars," Orszag said.
Previous efforts by Congress to rein in health care costs have done little. For instance, vows to trim Medicare reimbursements to doctors are routinely overturned.
The same has been true for efforts to stop what many consider government overpayments to Medicare Advantage, a privately administered program.
But "it's going to happen this year," said Obama health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle, who also was on the conference call.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the Senate bill would reduce deficits by $130 billion over the next decade. It would do so partly by raising various taxes and by reducing federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other programs by $491 billion over 10 years.
Republicans say such details are lost on many Americans, who might be led to believe the pending legislation would actually reduce overall spending on health care.
"All the Democrats' health care bills will increase costs, slash Medicare and raise taxes," said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.
Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, also criticized the Democratic proposals. She said the Senate bill would increase costs "by encouraging people to wait until they get sick to get insurance, adding new taxes on health care coverage and failing to include systemwide cost-containment provisions."
Ralph G. Neas, head of the Washington-based National Coalition on Health Care, which comprises unions, business groups, patient groups and others, called the House and Senate bills a good start. But Neas urged lawmakers to toughen the bills by including "a strong fail-safe provision" to ensure that segments of the health industry deliver cost savings they have promised.
Hart -- President Barack Obama
Hart --
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.
American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.
Our families are bound together through times of joy and times of grief. They shape us, support us, instill the values that guide us as individuals, and make possible all that we achieve.
So tomorrow, I'll be giving thanks for my family -- for all the wisdom, support, and love they have brought into my life.
But tomorrow is also a day to remember those who cannot sit down to break bread with those they love.
The soldier overseas holding down a lonely post and missing his kids. The sailor who left her home to serve a higher calling. The folks who must spend tomorrow apart from their families to work a second job, so they can keep food on the table or send a child to school.
We are grateful beyond words for the service and hard work of so many Americans who make our country great through their sacrifice. And this year, we know that far too many face a daily struggle that puts the comfort and security we all deserve painfully out of reach.
So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy.
It seems like a lifetime ago that a crowd met on a frigid February morning in Springfield, Illinois to set out on an improbable course to change our nation.
In the years since, Michelle and I have been blessed with the support and friendship of the millions of Americans who have come together to form this ongoing movement for change.
You have been there through victories and setbacks. You have given of yourselves beyond measure. You have enabled all that we have accomplished -- and you have had the courage to dream yet bigger dreams for what we can still achieve.
So in this season of thanks giving, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to you, and my anticipation of the brighter future we are creating together.
With warmest wishes for a happy holiday season from my family to yours,
President Barack Obama
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.
American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.
Our families are bound together through times of joy and times of grief. They shape us, support us, instill the values that guide us as individuals, and make possible all that we achieve.
So tomorrow, I'll be giving thanks for my family -- for all the wisdom, support, and love they have brought into my life.
But tomorrow is also a day to remember those who cannot sit down to break bread with those they love.
The soldier overseas holding down a lonely post and missing his kids. The sailor who left her home to serve a higher calling. The folks who must spend tomorrow apart from their families to work a second job, so they can keep food on the table or send a child to school.
We are grateful beyond words for the service and hard work of so many Americans who make our country great through their sacrifice. And this year, we know that far too many face a daily struggle that puts the comfort and security we all deserve painfully out of reach.
So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy.
It seems like a lifetime ago that a crowd met on a frigid February morning in Springfield, Illinois to set out on an improbable course to change our nation.
In the years since, Michelle and I have been blessed with the support and friendship of the millions of Americans who have come together to form this ongoing movement for change.
You have been there through victories and setbacks. You have given of yourselves beyond measure. You have enabled all that we have accomplished -- and you have had the courage to dream yet bigger dreams for what we can still achieve.
So in this season of thanks giving, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to you, and my anticipation of the brighter future we are creating together.
With warmest wishes for a happy holiday season from my family to yours,
President Barack Obama
A Milestone in the Health Care Journey
A Milestone in the Health Care Journey
When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.
"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."
Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."
Both the Senate bill's priority on controlling long-term health care costs, and its strategy for doing so, represents a validation for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT). When Baucus released his health reform proposal last September, after finally terminating months of fruitless negotiations with committee Republicans, Democratic liberals excoriated his plan as a dead end. And on several important fronts--such as subsidies for the uninsured, the role of a public competitor to private insurance companies, and the contribution required from employers who don't insure their workers--Reid moved his product away from Baucus toward approaches preferred by liberals.
But the Reid bill's fiscal strategy, and its vision of how to "bend the curve," almost completely follows Baucus' path from September. Baucus' bill was the first to establish the principle that Congress could expand coverage while reducing the federal deficit; now that's the standard not only for the Senate but also the House reform legislation. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Reid bill maintains virtually all of Baucus ideas' for shifting the medical payment system away from today's fee-for-service model toward an approach that more closely links compensation for providers to results for patients. In the Reid bill, there is some backtracking from Baucus' most aggressive reform proposals, but not much.
Almost everything Baucus proposed to control long-term costs have survived into the final bill. And, with only a few exceptions, that's just about all the systemic reforms analysts from the center to the left have identified as the most promising strategies for changing the economic incentives in the medical system. (The public competitor to private insurance companies championed by the Left would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for.) Most of the other big ideas for controlling costs (such as medical malpractice reform) tend to draw support primarily among Republicans. And since virtually, if not literally, none of them plan to support the final health care bill under any circumstances, the package isn't likely to reflect much of their thinking.
In their November 17 letter to Obama, the group of economists led by Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford University, identified four pillars of fiscally-responsible health care reform. They maintained that the bill needed to include a tax on high-end "Cadillac" insurance plans; to pursue "aggressive" tests of payment reforms that will "provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to focus on quality" and provide "care that is better coordinated"; and establish an independent Medicare commission that can continuously develop and implement "new efforts to improve quality and contain costs." Finally, they said the Congressional Budget Office "must project the bill to be at least deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window and deficit reducing thereafter."
As OMB Director Peter Orszag noted in an interview, the Reid bill met all those tests. The CBO projected that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion over its first decade and by as much as $650 billion in its second. (Conservatives, of course, consider those projections unrealistic, but CBO is the only umpire in the game, and Republicans have been happy to trumpet its analyses critical of the Democratic plans.) "Let's use the metric of that letter," said Orszag, who helped shape the health reform debate for years from his earlier posts at CBO and the Brookings Institution. "Deficit neutral; got that. Deficit-reducing second decade, got that. Excise tax: That was retained. Third is the Medicare commission: has that. Fourth is delivery system reforms, bundling payments, hospital acquired infections, readmission rates. It has that. If you go down the checklist of what they said was necessary for a fiscally responsible bill that will move us towards the health care system of the future, this passes the bar."
McClellan, the former Bush official and current director of the Engleberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution, was one of the economists who signed the November letter. McClellan has some very practical ideas for improving the Reid bill (more on those below), but generally he echoes Orszag's assessment of it. "It has got all four of those elements in it," McClellan said in an interview. "They kept a lot of the key elements of the Finance bill that I like. It would be good if more could be done, but this is the right direction to go."
Reid gave ground on one Baucus proposal that the economists identified as a priority-taxing high-end insurance plans. Like many health reformers, the economists who wrote Obama argue that such a tax "will help curtail the growth of private health insurance premiums by creating incentives to limit the costs of plans to a tax-free amount." Amid intense opposition from unions, Reid raised the thresholds at which family plans would face that excise tax from $21,000 to $23,000. But given all the pressure from labor, the more striking thing may have been that Reid didn't increase the thresholds even more; the CBO calculated the proposal, which the House excluded from its bill, would still raise $35 billion annually by 2019. "They held pretty strong," said one administration health care expert. "It's not like unions haven't been making the case that it shouldn't have been a much higher number."
On delivery reform, Reid stayed even closer to the Baucus blueprint. The Finance bill laid out a series of measures to change the way providers are paid for delivering care to Medicare recipients; the hope was that once Medicare instituted these reforms, private insurers would also adopt many of them. "The goal here is that the things we do in Medicare will translate over into the private sector, and there is quite a bit of historical precedence for that," said one Democratic aide involved in drafting the package.
The Baucus delivery reform ideas revolved around two central aims. One was to reward Medicare providers who deliver care more efficiently and penalize those that don't. The Reid bill upholds the major proposals Baucus offered to advance that goal. For instance, hospitals under current law must report on their performance in treating patients for common conditions like heart problems and pneumonia; under the bill, their Medicare payments, for the first time, would be affected by their ranking on those reports. Hospitals would also be penalized if they readmit too many patients after surgery or allow too many to acquire infections while in the hospital itself. Another provision would begin the process of applying such "value-based purchasing" toward other providers like hospice providers and inpatient rehabilitation facilities.
With physicians, the Reid plan takes a step back from the Finance Committee bill but still a long step beyond current law. The Finance Bill proposed automatic reimbursement reductions for doctors who order up the most care for Medicare recipients with similar medical and demographic characteristics. That was meant to respond to the research showing big disparities in spending on medical services for similarly-situated patients in different communities. But, Democratic sources say, that proposal ran into charges that it would promote rationing-and even function as "a death panel by proxy"-by compelling doctors to arbitrarily reduce care. So the final bill takes a less direct route toward a similar end. It requires Medicare to begin studying the utilization patterns of doctors participating in the program. And then it establishes a "values based payment modifier" that would, in a budget-neutral manner, increase reimbursements for physicians found to deliver high-quality care at lower cost, and reduce them for physicians at the other end of that spectrum. "It will, we believe, have the same net effect [as the original proposal]," said the Democratic aide. "It should change behavior around that threshold."
The other set of Baucus proposals were intended to promote more coordination among providers. These have survived almost verbatim into the final bill. The bill encourages groups of providers to establish doctor-led "accountable care organizations" to more comprehensively manage patients' care by allowing them to share in any savings for Medicare they produce. It also establishes a voluntary national pilot of "bundled" payments that would encourage hospitals, doctors and other providers to work more closely together. Another pilot program would test coordinated home-based care for chronically ill seniors.
Finally, the Reid bill maintains the two powerful institutions the Finance legislation proposed to promote these reforms and develop new ones. The one that's attracted the most attention is an independent "Medicare Advisory Board." Under the Senate bill, that board would be required to offer cost-saving proposals when Medicare spending rises too fast; Congress could not reject its proposals without substituting equivalent savings. Since the board would be prohibited from offering changes that raise taxes or "ration care," and since the legislation initially exempts hospitals from its recommendations, it could choose to promote the sort of payment reforms the bill establishes. (More prosaically it might also clear away some of the expensive coverage mandates that Congress imposes on Medicare under pressure from different elements of the medical industry). Given the limitations imposed on the commission, an equally important means to expand these reforms might be a second institution the legislation creates: a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in the Health and Human Services Department. Though this center has received much less attention than the Medicare Commission, it could have a comparable effect. It would receive $1 billion annually to test payment reforms; in a little known provision, the bill authorizes the HHS Secretary to implement nationwide, without any congressional action, any reform that department actuaries certify will reduce long-term spending. While the House bill omitted the Medicare Commission (a top priority for Obama) it included the innovation center.
No one can say for certain that these initiatives will improve efficiency enough to slow the growth in health care spending. Some are only pilots; others would affect only a small portion of providers' revenue from Medicare. CBO typically evaluates them skeptically: it generally scores little or no savings from most of them. Former CBO director Robert Reischauer, who signed the November 17 letter, says that's not surprising. "CBO is there to score savings for which we have a high degree of confidence that they will materialize," says Reischauer, now president of the Urban Institute. "There are many promising approaches [in these reform ideas] but you...can't deposit them in the bank." In the long run, Reischauer says, it's likely "that maybe half of them, or a third of them, will prove to be successful. But that would be very important."
While generally supportive of Reid's approach, McClellan, the former Medicare administrator under Bush, offered several specific ideas for strengthening it. He says the Senate should improve the capacity of HHS to more quickly evaluate whether the payment reforms are working, and also to provide data and technical assistance to new physician groups like the accountable care organizations that will be attempting to better coordinate care. "Ideally you'd both be able to tell the organizations involved and Congress what is working or not, and give the organizations the feedback and data they need to know whether they are doing a good job," he says. McClellan also believes that the plan needs sharper sticks-tougher penalties on providers who don't provide efficient and effective care. "There are a lot of carrots and not so many sticks," he maintains. Of course, tougher penalties might provoke more opposition from provider groups like hospitals and physicians now tenuously supporting the legislation.
[[McClellan stands at the forefront of centrist Republican thinking on health. Even the more ideologically conservative health care thinkers to his right generally don't oppose long-term reform ideas like bundling payments (John McCain promoted that during his presidential campaign). But they tend to view them as insufficient or tangential to the real problem. Their view highlights a fundamental difference between the parties' on health care. To save costs, Democrats mostly want to change the incentives for providers. Republicans mostly want to change the incentives for patients by shifting toward a model where insurance covers only catastrophic expenses and people pay for more routine care from tax-favored health savings accounts. In essence, the Republican view is that the best way to hold down long-term costs is to directly expose patients to more of them. Few Democrats accept that logic though and it has little influence on either chamber's legislation.
Another Republican cost-containment priority missing from the bill is meaningful medical malpractice reform. (The bill only encourages states to think about it.) Nichols, of the centrist New America Foundation, would like to see that included as well. Its omission is one reason he says he gives the plan a "b" rather than an "a"; the other is he'd like to see mechanisms to more quickly diffuse into the private insurance system reforms that show promise in Medicare. Democratic sources say a group of centrist Democrats led by Virginia Senator Mark Warner is trying to devise a package designed to do just that, perhaps by expanding the role of the independent Medicare advisory commission.
The attempt in all these ideas to nudge the medical system away from fee-for-service medicine toward an approach that ties compensation more closely to results captures how much the health care debate has shifted toward cost-control. So far, the rise in health care spending has proven almost invulnerable to every previous attempt to tame it, like the managed care revolution in the 1990s. Even if Obama signs into law a final bill embodying all these reform proposals, many skeptics wonder if they can bend, much less break, the seemingly inexorable increase in health care spending. Reischauer understands that skepticism, but isn't able to entirely suppress a kernel of optimism that this latest reform agenda may prove more effective than its predecessors. "One never knows whether we're turning the corner or if this is just playing the same old game for another inning," he says. "But I sense there's something different out there. I think the medical profession and its leaders have read the handwriting on the wall and are trying to evolve." If so, the ideas the Senate will begin voting on tonight could mark a milestone in that journey.
When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.
"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."
Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."
Both the Senate bill's priority on controlling long-term health care costs, and its strategy for doing so, represents a validation for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT). When Baucus released his health reform proposal last September, after finally terminating months of fruitless negotiations with committee Republicans, Democratic liberals excoriated his plan as a dead end. And on several important fronts--such as subsidies for the uninsured, the role of a public competitor to private insurance companies, and the contribution required from employers who don't insure their workers--Reid moved his product away from Baucus toward approaches preferred by liberals.
But the Reid bill's fiscal strategy, and its vision of how to "bend the curve," almost completely follows Baucus' path from September. Baucus' bill was the first to establish the principle that Congress could expand coverage while reducing the federal deficit; now that's the standard not only for the Senate but also the House reform legislation. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Reid bill maintains virtually all of Baucus ideas' for shifting the medical payment system away from today's fee-for-service model toward an approach that more closely links compensation for providers to results for patients. In the Reid bill, there is some backtracking from Baucus' most aggressive reform proposals, but not much.
Almost everything Baucus proposed to control long-term costs have survived into the final bill. And, with only a few exceptions, that's just about all the systemic reforms analysts from the center to the left have identified as the most promising strategies for changing the economic incentives in the medical system. (The public competitor to private insurance companies championed by the Left would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for.) Most of the other big ideas for controlling costs (such as medical malpractice reform) tend to draw support primarily among Republicans. And since virtually, if not literally, none of them plan to support the final health care bill under any circumstances, the package isn't likely to reflect much of their thinking.
In their November 17 letter to Obama, the group of economists led by Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford University, identified four pillars of fiscally-responsible health care reform. They maintained that the bill needed to include a tax on high-end "Cadillac" insurance plans; to pursue "aggressive" tests of payment reforms that will "provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to focus on quality" and provide "care that is better coordinated"; and establish an independent Medicare commission that can continuously develop and implement "new efforts to improve quality and contain costs." Finally, they said the Congressional Budget Office "must project the bill to be at least deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window and deficit reducing thereafter."
As OMB Director Peter Orszag noted in an interview, the Reid bill met all those tests. The CBO projected that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion over its first decade and by as much as $650 billion in its second. (Conservatives, of course, consider those projections unrealistic, but CBO is the only umpire in the game, and Republicans have been happy to trumpet its analyses critical of the Democratic plans.) "Let's use the metric of that letter," said Orszag, who helped shape the health reform debate for years from his earlier posts at CBO and the Brookings Institution. "Deficit neutral; got that. Deficit-reducing second decade, got that. Excise tax: That was retained. Third is the Medicare commission: has that. Fourth is delivery system reforms, bundling payments, hospital acquired infections, readmission rates. It has that. If you go down the checklist of what they said was necessary for a fiscally responsible bill that will move us towards the health care system of the future, this passes the bar."
McClellan, the former Bush official and current director of the Engleberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution, was one of the economists who signed the November letter. McClellan has some very practical ideas for improving the Reid bill (more on those below), but generally he echoes Orszag's assessment of it. "It has got all four of those elements in it," McClellan said in an interview. "They kept a lot of the key elements of the Finance bill that I like. It would be good if more could be done, but this is the right direction to go."
Reid gave ground on one Baucus proposal that the economists identified as a priority-taxing high-end insurance plans. Like many health reformers, the economists who wrote Obama argue that such a tax "will help curtail the growth of private health insurance premiums by creating incentives to limit the costs of plans to a tax-free amount." Amid intense opposition from unions, Reid raised the thresholds at which family plans would face that excise tax from $21,000 to $23,000. But given all the pressure from labor, the more striking thing may have been that Reid didn't increase the thresholds even more; the CBO calculated the proposal, which the House excluded from its bill, would still raise $35 billion annually by 2019. "They held pretty strong," said one administration health care expert. "It's not like unions haven't been making the case that it shouldn't have been a much higher number."
On delivery reform, Reid stayed even closer to the Baucus blueprint. The Finance bill laid out a series of measures to change the way providers are paid for delivering care to Medicare recipients; the hope was that once Medicare instituted these reforms, private insurers would also adopt many of them. "The goal here is that the things we do in Medicare will translate over into the private sector, and there is quite a bit of historical precedence for that," said one Democratic aide involved in drafting the package.
The Baucus delivery reform ideas revolved around two central aims. One was to reward Medicare providers who deliver care more efficiently and penalize those that don't. The Reid bill upholds the major proposals Baucus offered to advance that goal. For instance, hospitals under current law must report on their performance in treating patients for common conditions like heart problems and pneumonia; under the bill, their Medicare payments, for the first time, would be affected by their ranking on those reports. Hospitals would also be penalized if they readmit too many patients after surgery or allow too many to acquire infections while in the hospital itself. Another provision would begin the process of applying such "value-based purchasing" toward other providers like hospice providers and inpatient rehabilitation facilities.
With physicians, the Reid plan takes a step back from the Finance Committee bill but still a long step beyond current law. The Finance Bill proposed automatic reimbursement reductions for doctors who order up the most care for Medicare recipients with similar medical and demographic characteristics. That was meant to respond to the research showing big disparities in spending on medical services for similarly-situated patients in different communities. But, Democratic sources say, that proposal ran into charges that it would promote rationing-and even function as "a death panel by proxy"-by compelling doctors to arbitrarily reduce care. So the final bill takes a less direct route toward a similar end. It requires Medicare to begin studying the utilization patterns of doctors participating in the program. And then it establishes a "values based payment modifier" that would, in a budget-neutral manner, increase reimbursements for physicians found to deliver high-quality care at lower cost, and reduce them for physicians at the other end of that spectrum. "It will, we believe, have the same net effect [as the original proposal]," said the Democratic aide. "It should change behavior around that threshold."
The other set of Baucus proposals were intended to promote more coordination among providers. These have survived almost verbatim into the final bill. The bill encourages groups of providers to establish doctor-led "accountable care organizations" to more comprehensively manage patients' care by allowing them to share in any savings for Medicare they produce. It also establishes a voluntary national pilot of "bundled" payments that would encourage hospitals, doctors and other providers to work more closely together. Another pilot program would test coordinated home-based care for chronically ill seniors.
Finally, the Reid bill maintains the two powerful institutions the Finance legislation proposed to promote these reforms and develop new ones. The one that's attracted the most attention is an independent "Medicare Advisory Board." Under the Senate bill, that board would be required to offer cost-saving proposals when Medicare spending rises too fast; Congress could not reject its proposals without substituting equivalent savings. Since the board would be prohibited from offering changes that raise taxes or "ration care," and since the legislation initially exempts hospitals from its recommendations, it could choose to promote the sort of payment reforms the bill establishes. (More prosaically it might also clear away some of the expensive coverage mandates that Congress imposes on Medicare under pressure from different elements of the medical industry). Given the limitations imposed on the commission, an equally important means to expand these reforms might be a second institution the legislation creates: a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in the Health and Human Services Department. Though this center has received much less attention than the Medicare Commission, it could have a comparable effect. It would receive $1 billion annually to test payment reforms; in a little known provision, the bill authorizes the HHS Secretary to implement nationwide, without any congressional action, any reform that department actuaries certify will reduce long-term spending. While the House bill omitted the Medicare Commission (a top priority for Obama) it included the innovation center.
No one can say for certain that these initiatives will improve efficiency enough to slow the growth in health care spending. Some are only pilots; others would affect only a small portion of providers' revenue from Medicare. CBO typically evaluates them skeptically: it generally scores little or no savings from most of them. Former CBO director Robert Reischauer, who signed the November 17 letter, says that's not surprising. "CBO is there to score savings for which we have a high degree of confidence that they will materialize," says Reischauer, now president of the Urban Institute. "There are many promising approaches [in these reform ideas] but you...can't deposit them in the bank." In the long run, Reischauer says, it's likely "that maybe half of them, or a third of them, will prove to be successful. But that would be very important."
While generally supportive of Reid's approach, McClellan, the former Medicare administrator under Bush, offered several specific ideas for strengthening it. He says the Senate should improve the capacity of HHS to more quickly evaluate whether the payment reforms are working, and also to provide data and technical assistance to new physician groups like the accountable care organizations that will be attempting to better coordinate care. "Ideally you'd both be able to tell the organizations involved and Congress what is working or not, and give the organizations the feedback and data they need to know whether they are doing a good job," he says. McClellan also believes that the plan needs sharper sticks-tougher penalties on providers who don't provide efficient and effective care. "There are a lot of carrots and not so many sticks," he maintains. Of course, tougher penalties might provoke more opposition from provider groups like hospitals and physicians now tenuously supporting the legislation.
[[McClellan stands at the forefront of centrist Republican thinking on health. Even the more ideologically conservative health care thinkers to his right generally don't oppose long-term reform ideas like bundling payments (John McCain promoted that during his presidential campaign). But they tend to view them as insufficient or tangential to the real problem. Their view highlights a fundamental difference between the parties' on health care. To save costs, Democrats mostly want to change the incentives for providers. Republicans mostly want to change the incentives for patients by shifting toward a model where insurance covers only catastrophic expenses and people pay for more routine care from tax-favored health savings accounts. In essence, the Republican view is that the best way to hold down long-term costs is to directly expose patients to more of them. Few Democrats accept that logic though and it has little influence on either chamber's legislation.
Another Republican cost-containment priority missing from the bill is meaningful medical malpractice reform. (The bill only encourages states to think about it.) Nichols, of the centrist New America Foundation, would like to see that included as well. Its omission is one reason he says he gives the plan a "b" rather than an "a"; the other is he'd like to see mechanisms to more quickly diffuse into the private insurance system reforms that show promise in Medicare. Democratic sources say a group of centrist Democrats led by Virginia Senator Mark Warner is trying to devise a package designed to do just that, perhaps by expanding the role of the independent Medicare advisory commission.
The attempt in all these ideas to nudge the medical system away from fee-for-service medicine toward an approach that ties compensation more closely to results captures how much the health care debate has shifted toward cost-control. So far, the rise in health care spending has proven almost invulnerable to every previous attempt to tame it, like the managed care revolution in the 1990s. Even if Obama signs into law a final bill embodying all these reform proposals, many skeptics wonder if they can bend, much less break, the seemingly inexorable increase in health care spending. Reischauer understands that skepticism, but isn't able to entirely suppress a kernel of optimism that this latest reform agenda may prove more effective than its predecessors. "One never knows whether we're turning the corner or if this is just playing the same old game for another inning," he says. "But I sense there's something different out there. I think the medical profession and its leaders have read the handwriting on the wall and are trying to evolve." If so, the ideas the Senate will begin voting on tonight could mark a milestone in that journey.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
MEDIA MATTERS weekly update on stuff that matters!
Media Matters: The Palin chronicles
It was all too predictable.
From the moment Sarah Palin was airlifted out of the Alaska hinterlands by John McCain and plopped onto the national stage, she's been telling anyone who will listen how poorly she's been treated by the media, the Democrats, the blogosphere, etc. After she did her part in scuttling McCain's already foundering campaign, she added to her list of personal persecutors the same McCain staffers who made her a household name in the first place. The conservative media have cheered on her personal pity party every step of the way, adamantly refusing to acknowledge that Sarah Palin -- perfect Sarah Palin, conservatism's hockey-mom messiah -- has done anything wrong.
So it was inevitable that when Palin and her ghostwriter teamed up to produce her newly release memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, it would be anything but a tedious exercise in self-martyrdom. The second half of the book, which recounts her time with McCain and the aftermath of the presidential campaign, is a litany of complaints peppered with absolutions of any errors on her part. Palin's account of her disastrous interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric consists mainly of attacks on Couric for "badgering" her, "edit[ing] out substantive answers," and trying to "frame a 'gotcha' moment." She chastises McCain campaign staffers for having "no script to begin with," for not following her advice and talking about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and for nurturing the "wardrobe fairy tale" so they could throw her "under the media bus" after the campaign ended.
When not complaining about how ill-treated she was, Palin wildly revised her own history, showcasing her penchant for falsehoods both big and small. She claims that the media were reporting "lies" about the Bridge to Nowhere, when it was she who, from the very start, lied about her own position on the bridge. She claims that she immediately liked the idea of going on Saturday Night Live, even though internal campaign emails show that she was initially reluctant because of the show's "gross" treatment of her family, going so far as to call the SNL crew "whack." She claims that there is no aerial hunting in Alaska, even though she proposed legislation supporting that very practice. The list goes on and on.
But remember, this is Sarah Palin we're dealing with here, and no matter how self-discrediting and ridiculous her book was, the conservative media would leap to her defense, claiming (once again) that she was the victim of a vicious liberal onslaught. Palin herself got the ball rolling before the book was even released, chastising the Associated Press (which got its hands on a copy prior to the release date) for assigning 11 reporters to fact-check it, saying that their time would be better spent fact-checking "what's going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial." Palin made no attempt to respond to the several factual errors and distortions the AP found, and neither did Fox News, which picked up where Palin left off and ran a breathless segment wondering why, exactly, the AP had assigned so many reporters to the book.
Then there's Rush Limbaugh, Palin's staunchest defender and perhaps the conservative media personality most disconnected from reality -- two traits that are in no way mutually exclusive. On November 13, Rush proclaimed that Going Rogue is "one of the most substantive policy books I've read." He must have received a special unabridged edition, because to every other observer -- even Fox News campaign reporter/operative Carl Cameron -- the book's policy prescriptions are few and far between, and rarely more detailed than "Ronald Reagan was right." In the conservative blogosphere, the adoration was even more comical: John Ziegler, the devoted Palinista who is -- and forgive the indelicate bluntness, but there is no better word -- an idiot, called the book the "greatest literary achievement by a political figure in my lifetime."
Meanwhile, the mainstream press ties itself into knots with their obsessive Palin coverage, trying to explain how it is that a riotously unpopular and ill-informed ex-governor speaks for legions of Americans. Newsweek undercut whatever merit its critical analysis of Palin's role in the political world had by festooning it with sexist Palin imagery. David Brooks continues to vacillate in his opinion of Palin, at various times calling her "smart," "a joke," "courageous and likeable," and a "cancer." PBS' Gwen Ifill said women "will be drawn to her story," even though Palin's popularity among women is in the toilet.
None of this is to say that Palin isn't shrewd. She's figured out that she can say whatever she pleases, lie freely, quit elected office to become a professional Facebook bomb-thrower, cash in on a ridiculous book she didn't even write, and still enjoy the adoration of her conservative fan base, as well as the attentions of the mainstream press.
Other major stories this week
KSM trial drives conservatives into hypocritical hysterics
On May 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly led off his Fox News show with the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was tried in civilian court and handed several consecutive life terms for his role in the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to O'Reilly: "The al Qaeda savage promptly thanked them by saying 'America, you lost. I won.' But like what most of this degenerate says, he is wrong. Moussaoui is condemned to rot in his cell until he does die and if the Federal penitentiary is run properly, Moussaoui will be denied any and all privileges." O'Reilly explained that "by not executing Moussaoui, the U.S.A. shows the world we are a nation of laws, a nation that puts power in the hands of regular folks."
Now fast-forward a few years -- the Democrats take control of the White House, and the new president announces he's bringing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York to face trial before a civilian court. O'Reilly, who praised the civilian trial of Moussaoui, says of the decision to Bush White House adviser Karl Rove: "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, that is a terrible decision. ... Because you know, I know, and everybody knows it's going to cost the city of New York between $75 and $100 million. These animals are going to get up there. They're going to lie. The lawyers are going to turn it into an anti-Bush, anti-CIA, anti-American extravaganza."
Just think about that one for a moment -- O'Reilly, who praised the civilian prosecution of Moussaoui in 2006, is complaining about the White House's civilian prosecution of Mohammed in 2009, to a person who was part of the White House that decided to prosecute Moussaoui in a civilian court.
O'Reilly wasn't the only person to pull the ol' Moussaoui/Mohammed switcheroo on Fox News. Former New York mayor and 9-11 enthusiast Rudy Giuliani appeared on Neil Cavuto's show last Friday to attack the Mohammed decision as a "terrible, terrible mistake," explaining that the terrorist "should be prosecuted in a military tribunal." Cavuto neglected to point out that in 2006, Giuliani said of the Moussaoui trial: "It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law."
Indeed, confusion abounded among conservatives everywhere. Morning Joe namesake Joe Scarborough declared it "unprecedented" to try a terrorism suspect in the U.S. judicial system. To his credit, Scarborough later corrected this false assertion.
No one expects conservatives to support President Obama, particularly on issues of national security. But is a little consistency too much to ask? Well, maybe consistency is too much -- how about something less than outright hypocrisy?
Rupert's "racist" revisionism
Last week, Media Matters chronicled News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch's humanitarian efforts to help recuperate ailing Fox News superstar Glenn Beck by going on TV and announcing that Beck was right to call Obama a "racist." It was a curious comment for several reasons -- Fox News had already dismissed Beck's statement as an expression of opinion and not the position of the network, and people were already painfully aware that Beck hadn't faced any repercussions for his outburst. So in throwing his lot in with Beck, all Murdoch did was essentially confirm that outlandish attacks on the Democratic president are nothing short of official policy over at Fox News.
Then, of course, came the inevitable denial, in which Murdoch's spokesman stated without elaboration that his boss "does not at all, for a minute, think the president is a racist." Perhaps he was unaware that when you say things on TV, lots of people see it (unless, of course, you say it on Fox Business Network).
So you can understand why we were feeling a bit confused. Does Rupert Murdoch think President Obama is a racist or not? Well, there was only one way to get an answer -- ask Rupert himself. And that's exactly what we did. Confronted by Media Matters and asked which comment of the president's he considered racist, Murdoch responded: "I denied that absolutely. ... I don't believe he's a racist."
Well, that clears things up.
Wait. Actually, no ... it doesn't.
It's funny, in a way, to watch all this play out. Murdoch and his Fox News underlings know that even they have lines they can't cross, such as lobbing accusations of racism at the president, but they do it anyway, seemingly unable to help themselves. And when they do get in trouble, their response is always the same -- deny you said that thing that millions of people saw you say, make sure absolutely no one faces any consequences whatsoever, and move on to the next ridiculous story about Obama, which this week was the hyperventilating obsession over Obama's bow to the Japanese emperor.
Fox News would like everyone to believe that they operate under some sort of journalistic standard. If you want to be extremely generous and grant that this standard does in fact exist, then it's irreparably broken. Misbehavior is rewarded, accountability is nonexistent, and the ethical cues coming from upper management are hardly worth emulating.
It was all too predictable.
From the moment Sarah Palin was airlifted out of the Alaska hinterlands by John McCain and plopped onto the national stage, she's been telling anyone who will listen how poorly she's been treated by the media, the Democrats, the blogosphere, etc. After she did her part in scuttling McCain's already foundering campaign, she added to her list of personal persecutors the same McCain staffers who made her a household name in the first place. The conservative media have cheered on her personal pity party every step of the way, adamantly refusing to acknowledge that Sarah Palin -- perfect Sarah Palin, conservatism's hockey-mom messiah -- has done anything wrong.
So it was inevitable that when Palin and her ghostwriter teamed up to produce her newly release memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, it would be anything but a tedious exercise in self-martyrdom. The second half of the book, which recounts her time with McCain and the aftermath of the presidential campaign, is a litany of complaints peppered with absolutions of any errors on her part. Palin's account of her disastrous interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric consists mainly of attacks on Couric for "badgering" her, "edit[ing] out substantive answers," and trying to "frame a 'gotcha' moment." She chastises McCain campaign staffers for having "no script to begin with," for not following her advice and talking about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and for nurturing the "wardrobe fairy tale" so they could throw her "under the media bus" after the campaign ended.
When not complaining about how ill-treated she was, Palin wildly revised her own history, showcasing her penchant for falsehoods both big and small. She claims that the media were reporting "lies" about the Bridge to Nowhere, when it was she who, from the very start, lied about her own position on the bridge. She claims that she immediately liked the idea of going on Saturday Night Live, even though internal campaign emails show that she was initially reluctant because of the show's "gross" treatment of her family, going so far as to call the SNL crew "whack." She claims that there is no aerial hunting in Alaska, even though she proposed legislation supporting that very practice. The list goes on and on.
But remember, this is Sarah Palin we're dealing with here, and no matter how self-discrediting and ridiculous her book was, the conservative media would leap to her defense, claiming (once again) that she was the victim of a vicious liberal onslaught. Palin herself got the ball rolling before the book was even released, chastising the Associated Press (which got its hands on a copy prior to the release date) for assigning 11 reporters to fact-check it, saying that their time would be better spent fact-checking "what's going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial." Palin made no attempt to respond to the several factual errors and distortions the AP found, and neither did Fox News, which picked up where Palin left off and ran a breathless segment wondering why, exactly, the AP had assigned so many reporters to the book.
Then there's Rush Limbaugh, Palin's staunchest defender and perhaps the conservative media personality most disconnected from reality -- two traits that are in no way mutually exclusive. On November 13, Rush proclaimed that Going Rogue is "one of the most substantive policy books I've read." He must have received a special unabridged edition, because to every other observer -- even Fox News campaign reporter/operative Carl Cameron -- the book's policy prescriptions are few and far between, and rarely more detailed than "Ronald Reagan was right." In the conservative blogosphere, the adoration was even more comical: John Ziegler, the devoted Palinista who is -- and forgive the indelicate bluntness, but there is no better word -- an idiot, called the book the "greatest literary achievement by a political figure in my lifetime."
Meanwhile, the mainstream press ties itself into knots with their obsessive Palin coverage, trying to explain how it is that a riotously unpopular and ill-informed ex-governor speaks for legions of Americans. Newsweek undercut whatever merit its critical analysis of Palin's role in the political world had by festooning it with sexist Palin imagery. David Brooks continues to vacillate in his opinion of Palin, at various times calling her "smart," "a joke," "courageous and likeable," and a "cancer." PBS' Gwen Ifill said women "will be drawn to her story," even though Palin's popularity among women is in the toilet.
None of this is to say that Palin isn't shrewd. She's figured out that she can say whatever she pleases, lie freely, quit elected office to become a professional Facebook bomb-thrower, cash in on a ridiculous book she didn't even write, and still enjoy the adoration of her conservative fan base, as well as the attentions of the mainstream press.
Other major stories this week
KSM trial drives conservatives into hypocritical hysterics
On May 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly led off his Fox News show with the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was tried in civilian court and handed several consecutive life terms for his role in the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to O'Reilly: "The al Qaeda savage promptly thanked them by saying 'America, you lost. I won.' But like what most of this degenerate says, he is wrong. Moussaoui is condemned to rot in his cell until he does die and if the Federal penitentiary is run properly, Moussaoui will be denied any and all privileges." O'Reilly explained that "by not executing Moussaoui, the U.S.A. shows the world we are a nation of laws, a nation that puts power in the hands of regular folks."
Now fast-forward a few years -- the Democrats take control of the White House, and the new president announces he's bringing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York to face trial before a civilian court. O'Reilly, who praised the civilian trial of Moussaoui, says of the decision to Bush White House adviser Karl Rove: "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, that is a terrible decision. ... Because you know, I know, and everybody knows it's going to cost the city of New York between $75 and $100 million. These animals are going to get up there. They're going to lie. The lawyers are going to turn it into an anti-Bush, anti-CIA, anti-American extravaganza."
Just think about that one for a moment -- O'Reilly, who praised the civilian prosecution of Moussaoui in 2006, is complaining about the White House's civilian prosecution of Mohammed in 2009, to a person who was part of the White House that decided to prosecute Moussaoui in a civilian court.
O'Reilly wasn't the only person to pull the ol' Moussaoui/Mohammed switcheroo on Fox News. Former New York mayor and 9-11 enthusiast Rudy Giuliani appeared on Neil Cavuto's show last Friday to attack the Mohammed decision as a "terrible, terrible mistake," explaining that the terrorist "should be prosecuted in a military tribunal." Cavuto neglected to point out that in 2006, Giuliani said of the Moussaoui trial: "It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law."
Indeed, confusion abounded among conservatives everywhere. Morning Joe namesake Joe Scarborough declared it "unprecedented" to try a terrorism suspect in the U.S. judicial system. To his credit, Scarborough later corrected this false assertion.
No one expects conservatives to support President Obama, particularly on issues of national security. But is a little consistency too much to ask? Well, maybe consistency is too much -- how about something less than outright hypocrisy?
Rupert's "racist" revisionism
Last week, Media Matters chronicled News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch's humanitarian efforts to help recuperate ailing Fox News superstar Glenn Beck by going on TV and announcing that Beck was right to call Obama a "racist." It was a curious comment for several reasons -- Fox News had already dismissed Beck's statement as an expression of opinion and not the position of the network, and people were already painfully aware that Beck hadn't faced any repercussions for his outburst. So in throwing his lot in with Beck, all Murdoch did was essentially confirm that outlandish attacks on the Democratic president are nothing short of official policy over at Fox News.
Then, of course, came the inevitable denial, in which Murdoch's spokesman stated without elaboration that his boss "does not at all, for a minute, think the president is a racist." Perhaps he was unaware that when you say things on TV, lots of people see it (unless, of course, you say it on Fox Business Network).
So you can understand why we were feeling a bit confused. Does Rupert Murdoch think President Obama is a racist or not? Well, there was only one way to get an answer -- ask Rupert himself. And that's exactly what we did. Confronted by Media Matters and asked which comment of the president's he considered racist, Murdoch responded: "I denied that absolutely. ... I don't believe he's a racist."
Well, that clears things up.
Wait. Actually, no ... it doesn't.
It's funny, in a way, to watch all this play out. Murdoch and his Fox News underlings know that even they have lines they can't cross, such as lobbing accusations of racism at the president, but they do it anyway, seemingly unable to help themselves. And when they do get in trouble, their response is always the same -- deny you said that thing that millions of people saw you say, make sure absolutely no one faces any consequences whatsoever, and move on to the next ridiculous story about Obama, which this week was the hyperventilating obsession over Obama's bow to the Japanese emperor.
Fox News would like everyone to believe that they operate under some sort of journalistic standard. If you want to be extremely generous and grant that this standard does in fact exist, then it's irreparably broken. Misbehavior is rewarded, accountability is nonexistent, and the ethical cues coming from upper management are hardly worth emulating.
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