White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

All the News That’s Fit To Read

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And the winner is …. “Diane Sawyer to anchor ABC ‘World News.’ ”

 

In case you missed it, right up there with Afghanistan, health-care reform and swine flu is the news that someone other than Charles Gibson will be anchoring the flagship ABC evening program “World News” next year. Whew! Yes, Diane Sawyer is going to read us the news–all 22 minutes of it.

 

And why not Diane Sawyer? She is one of the most gifted people working in television, and she must be heartily sick of getting up at 3:30 a.m.

 

If there is a better resume floating around ABC News, it is hard to think whose it might be. Sawyer got her start as a local television reporter in Louisville, Ky. She worked as a press assistant in the Nixon White House. After Nixon’s retirement, she helped the president write his autobiography and prepare for the legendary interviews with British journalist David Frost.

 

In television, Sawyer has been a star for nearly 40 years. Energy, ability, hard work were taken at the flood and led on to victory. Compared to the dolly-bird journalists so favored in television these days, all peroxide and lip gloss, Sawyer is the real thing: an capable, experience journalist.

 

So why is she going to helm the evening news? Because, foolishly, both we and the networks–even in the twilight of their being–are in a time warp where we think it is important who reads the news at night. It is the Walter Cronkite-Edward Murrow legacy.

 

Yet those of us who know something about television, know that reading the news is a sinecure. If you are a halfway decent sight-reader, the work is light lifting. The networks and the anchors have tried to conceal this by making the anchors “managing editors,” but the subterfuge has its limits.

 

Television news is put together by a phalanx of producers and correspondents and it is, in fact, hard for the anchor to substantially reshape the product. The anchor’s views can be known and over time, and he or she can change the product by changing the culture. This can also be expressed as firing people you do not agree with. A friend of mine at ABC got cast into outer darkness when the anchor changed.

 

These upheavals are taken for granted. Television is a tough business in which the few who get to the top are well rewarded, but many fall victim to the star system and the star’s team.

 

I wrote for television anchors once and they were of two schools: Those who showed up and read what was put in front of them and those sought to influence what was put in front of them. We, the writers, liked the former and loathed the latter. We were proud of our work and did not want it denigrated by some star.

But the networks want to promote the concept that the newscaster is some kind of uber-journalist who spends long hours covering the news, bullying sources, confronting bureaucrats and exposing fraudsters. In reality, they are driven around in limousines, have lunches with other famous people at expensive restaurants, and spend a lot of time suggesting to the producers that they read an article in some newspaper, especially The New York Times. Often the skill of the producers is in parrying these suggestions. In Evelyn Waugh’s great comic novel “Scoop,” the protagonist parries the proprietor’s suggestions by saying, “to a point, Lord Copper.”

 

As fewer and fewer of us get our news from the networks, it is curious that who is going to read it to us is still newsworthy. It is not curious why someone would want the job. It pays wondrously and has all the prestige you can stand. The only downside is the ratings: the daily goad delivered by the Nielsen company.

 

I think Diane Sawyer will be a great anchor and she will be able to take it easier than at “Good Morning America.” But we will be deprived of her talent which has shined at breakfast time for a decade. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

The Politics behind the Lockerbie-Libya Affair

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Some damned fool on one of the cable television channels opined that the special relationship between Britain and America notwithstanding, Britain should face sanctions for allowing the return to Libya of the only terrorist imprisoned for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988.

 

I did not get the name of the buffoon who suggested that we sanction our greatest ally and a top investor and trading partner. Maybe the British should sanction us for using their language without paying a royalty every time we open our mouths.

 

The broadly reviled decision to send Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi back to Libya because of his medical condition has more to do with surging Scottish nationalism than with British perfidy.

 

London may have interests in trade with Libya, but would not have moved to free the prisoner, knowing how deep survivor feeling runs on both sides of the Atlantic; and knowing how seriously the United States takes the prosecution and punishment of terrorists. There was an understanding between London and Washington that the perpetrators (only one was prosecuted) would serve their full sentences if convicted.

 

Enter the Scottish nationalists, who are particularly assertive at present, and are hoping one day to break up the United Kingdom. Scotland and England, after a long and bloody history were united in 1707 under the Acts of Union. The merger was voted by the Scottish and English parliaments.

 

But rather than a merger of equals, it was a coercive match. Scotland was desperately poor at the time, and hoped to prosper from the inclusion in British trading around the globe. Also, some members of the Scottish parliament were bribed but the larger reality was that Scotland was, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. So the union went ahead, and Queen Anne was the first monarch of the United Kingdom.

 

Over the 300 years of union, the relationship has ebbed and flowed. While Scotland benefited from the textile boom that set off the Industrial Revolution and from the production of wool, it lost its language and the Scots resented the Anglification of their country. Poet Robert Burns, writing in dialect railed against the English. And the Scots call the English “Sassenachs” (trans. Lowlanders), a term of abuse.

 

There was some softening of the Scottish attitude to England during the long rule of Queen Victoria, mainly because she spent long periods at the royal estate at Balmoral in Scotland. Some have speculated that the history of Ireland might have been different if Victoria had been one half so fond the Irish as she was of the Scots.

 

The Scots, traditionally a proud and independent people, began a long decline in the 20th century; a decline led in part by the loss of heavy industries like shipbuilding. The discovery of oil in the North Sea and along the Scottish coast helped financially, but it failed to revive Scottish spirits. More and more turned to the welfare state and supported the Labor Party. Conservatives totally lost their footing in Scotland.

 

But help was on the way in the unlikely person of Tony Blair, the Labor Party’s longest-serving prime minister, who favored devolution–or the creation of a self-governing Scotland and Wales with their own devolved national assemblies. The Conservatives, led by John Major, called this blow at the structure of the union “folly.” The Scottish nationalists, led by Alex Salmond, swept to power in Scotland, beating the Labor Party which had been so generous.

 

Nothing about devolution suggested that the government of Scotland would have a say in British foreign policy, but they would control the prisons. And, despite the awkwardness it has caused, freeing al-Megrahi gave the Scottish nationalists an opportunity to claim world recognition; embarrass the British government; and, for good measure, gratuitously stick it to America. Whereas Irish nationalists feel a strong affiliation with the United States, the Scots do not.The Scottish Nationalist Party seeks independence one day, and international recognition today. The Scots are on the march.

 

For their part, the English have reason to be vexed at the Scots. Not only do they take a certain amount of abuse, but England pours more money into Scotland than Scottish taxes yield. While the Scots vote for members of the House of Commons, the English do not vote for members of the Scottish Parliament. This imbalance is known as the “West Lothian Question.”

 

Even though the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is a Scot, he has no influence north of the border. The breakup of the United Kingdom may be underway–unless the English come up with another bribe.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The CIA’s Private Suburb

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Reston, Va., was founded as a model community. It lies about 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. and 15 miles from Langley, Va., home of the CIA.

From its founding idealists made their homes in Reston, as did employees of the CIA. It was a live-and-let-live place. It was a place that asserted its residents had things right in their heads: They were against racism, for peace, and for toleration of divorce and differing sexual orientation. They spoiled their children, enjoyed their martinis, and tried to be humble in a superior kind of way.

The CIA types fit right in with the other Restonians, partly because they were no different and partly because no one knew who worked at the CIA in the late 1960s. CIA employees talked vaguely about jobs in government, but did not spell them out. Novelists and newspapermen wrote that the CIA was headquartered in Langley, but casual travelers could not tell exactly where. On the George Washington Parkway, the sign for the turnoff for the agency said something about the Virginia Department of Highways.

Not only did the dreamers in Reston not know how many of the CIA’s employees lived among them, came to their parties and played with their children, but they also could not believe that their neighbors had anything to do with the big, bad things the CIA did, like overthrowing governments, assassinating dictators and pushing the envelope in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Overthrowing the duly elected but far leftward Salvador Allende in Chile was not something you thought your cheery neighbor had a hand in.

Then, the CIA came in from the cold. It stopped pretending: It got its own road signs, employed a public relations staff and joined the suburban life in Northern Virginia without artifice. In ultra-liberal Reston, people simply believed that their CIA neighbors, who would identify themselves as working for “the company,” were the good spies not the bad operatives. Rather than ostracizing the company’s employees, Restonians venerated them. Spies were cool: “I know you can’t tell me what you do, but I think it’s very romantic.”

All of this came flooding back to me, along with my own days in Reston, when I read about the advanced interrogation techniques practiced by the CIA against high-value prisoners. Are the people who make prisoners stand naked and have their heads banged into a wall the same people who are active in soccer coaching on one of Reston’s many sports fields​?

Are the seemingly benign bureaucrats, who yawn early on Friday evenings after a hard week, the same splendid guys who deprive prisoners of sleep for 180 hours, keep them in bright lights and with noise as loud as a locomotive up close? Are the guys who watch out for their kids at the pool the same fellows who do the water-boarding at secret prisons?

Do the wives who drive large cars, because their husbands would be too cramped in a small car, know that these same husbands stuff prisoners into crates where the pain might force a confession? Do the good people living the American Dream in bucolic Reston also enjoy walking on what former vice president Dick Cheney called “the dark side?”

Who are the advanced interrogation specialists? Are they secret sadists, super-patriots or just run-of-the-mill government employees?

Is my consternation at the knowledge that the CIA did things to prisoners that could be called torture naïve, a liberal indulgence? What would I do if I worked in Langley as well as lived in idealistic Reston? Would I “walk on the dark side?” Is it the torturer next door or the one within which has me in shock?

 

Reston is increasingly just another suburb shorn of the better-world pretensions that ruled in the late 1960s and though the 1970s. The residential requirements of the CIA’s employees are no longer notable—just its actions.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ireland: Trouble in Threes

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BALLINA, Ireland–Even by Ireland’s legendary standards for rain, this summer has been particularly wet. But it not the weather that accounts for the gloom in the Emerald Isle. As heavy rains were pushing the River Moy, which flows through this Co. Mayo town of 8,000, above flood stage, the attendees of the Humbert Summer School (a kind of think tank) were pondering this solemn subject: “Can Ireland be redeemed?” The answer was maybe, if there was a single answer.

Ireland is in the grip of two crises and is facing a third—three crises that undermine its national self-confidence and imperil its economic future.

Crisis One: A shattering report on child abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland has found that it was systematic and extended possibly over centuries; that it was known and tolerated by the highest levels of government; and that it was also known and tolerated by the Vatican. Indeed Tom Arnold, head of Concern, a Dublin charity, told the conference that the Vatican did not act because it believed the church would be undermined and it wanted a devout Christian country to counter the secular nature of neighboring Britain.

The child abuse scandal, which dwarfs church sex scandals elsewhere, is alleged in Ireland to have been more pervasive, more institutionalized and to incorporate cruelty, especially by the notorious Christian Brothers, a disciplinary educational order. For the Irish, with their large families and sense of family values being paramount, the full extent of the scandal has been devastating, causing a great swath of the population to wonder how long they have been living a lie.

Crisis Two: The Irish economy is in tatters and, by most analysis, will not recover in tandem with the rest of the world.

In recent years Ireland has enjoyed prosperity, the like of which it has never known in history. It boomed partly because of European Union structural funds and partly because of American computer companies, which located there to take advantage of the population’s high literacy rate. Computer firms flooded cities like Galway: once a dreamy seaport city more famous for its bookshops than its millionaires.

The boom caused Ireland to be dubbed “The Celtic Tiger.” Ireland was growing faster than any other economy in Europe.

With dynamic growth came overheating and property speculation. And with property speculation came banking insanity. The banks were eager, too eager, to lend against inflating property values. Sound familiar?

But now, the banks are being bailed out and the taxpayers are howling. Justice Vivian Lavan told me that no houses are being sold because no one knows how to value them. Unemployment, under control for 15 years, is back and climbing beyond 13 percent.

On the horizon is Crisis Three: Once again, the Irish have to vote on the Lisbon Treaty: a document that tidies up odds and ends in the structure of the European Union. A year ago, Irish voters rejected the treaty to the considerable annoyance of the rest of the EU and the embarrassment of the Irish government.

Now Irish objections have been met and a new vote, critical to Ireland’s continuing influence in the councils of Europe, is scheduled for Oct. 2.

Ireland, with a population of only 4.5 million, has worked tirelessly to extend its influence through “good offices” and diplomatic maneuvering. Now, that is imperiled. Ireland may well again bite the hand that has fed it generously.

In favor of the treaty are the main Irish political parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail); the Irish business establishment: and the inward investors, including American companies like Shell Oil and Dell. Against is a strange coalition that includes the nationalistic Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Irish Republican Army), extremely conservative Catholic groups, Greens and a band of hippie activists. On paper they are not much, but they defeated the Lisbon Treaty last June. They argue that Europe will legalize and promote abortion, imperil Irish neutrality, raise taxes and dilute labor laws. Proponents say there are cast-iron guarantees on all of these issues, but detractors say they are not worth the paper they are written on. The Oct. 2 referendum on the treaty will test a battered island. –For North Star Writers Group

 

New to Protesting? Enjoy

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One can only be glad that so many white middle-class conservatives are fairly late in life learning the joy of protest, the feeling the thrill of the barricades, and experiencing the carthartic wonders of getting involved.

 

Let’s face it, public protest is exhilarating. To see so many otherwise stodgy people on an adrenalin high as they shout down their elected representatives and lay siege to the very idea of a town-hall meeting as a forum for ideas, is to take one back to civil rights marches, anti-nuclear demonstrations, picket lines and construction protests.

 

You’ve not lived until you’ve yelled your heart out in public. Protest–even misguided protest–is good for the soul.

 

Day after day we see really nice respectable people giving voice to their dislike of the Obama administration, their sense that the America that has been so generous to them is changing; that it may not be as generous to their grandchildren.

 

Righteous anger is as good as a whole slew of martinis, and there are no calories and no hangover.

 

After all, this all about heat not light. You’re out there yelling in public for one of two reasons: (1)You’ve missed doing it since the days of Vietnam War, protests, or (2) It’s something you’ve never done because the beastly liberals were doing it.

 

These protesters want to take back America. But first, they want to wrest the joy of public protesting from the liberals. For too long these crypto-socialists have had all the fun, from free love to smoking exotic cheroots and pouring into the streets to protest every conservative initiative, social policy or war. Just think of Victor Hugo.

 

Begone liberals. You can’t have all the fun because now we have some of it. And if any of those crackpot, socialistic, inconveniently elected Congress types try and sell their Dr. Government health care schemes by town hall meeting, we’ll be there, golf shirts and pants with a touch of spandex freshly laundered. Protesting is no longer for the unwashed; people with Brooks Brothers suits in the closet can now head to the barricades to fight for the right.

 

These town hall meetings are the gift that keeps on giving. There’s really no impediment to the joy of protest for the aging guys and gals who find

retirement a yawn. Public policy activism is the tonic these people need. Get out there and let Obamacare take it on the chin. Tell them that old people are left to die in England, that rationing dominates in Canada, that the French are forced to guzzle wine in lieu of medication, and that the Japanese are falling like flies.

 

Isn’t this a great country in which even conservatives can have a go at hitting the bricks?

 

You’re the rebels now, at the baracades, standing strong against the forces of the evil reformers. Compare socialized medicine with the post office. Beat on those bureaucrats, who you claim are going to be making health care decisions instead of doctors.

 

Here is a quick guide for the neophyte protester:

 

Don’t use an out-of-state car. Don’t wear too many diamonds. Journalists don’t understand; besides they’re in the tank for Obama. Try to look like a liberal: shabby. Don’t mention daddy’s fortune, your Palm Beach pied-a-terre, or the place in France. Go forth and shout for America.

 

Just one more thing: Whatever you do, don’t let it out that you are on Medicare. Sadly, it’s one of the most popular government programs ever.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Obama on Fantasy Island

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Things are lovely in New England this time of year. And nowhere lovelier than on Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island where billionaire bankers like to get away from the carping criticism of the enormous bonuses they got for screwing up the global financial system.

 

All is well on Martha’s Vineyard. The faux Englishness thrives in the faux villages. During the day, happy children crowd the beaches and parents shop for nick-knacks in overpriced shops. In the evening, the island’s summer people party with the same people they partied with the night before at a different house.

 

There are three East Coast destinations for the effete mega-money set: Martha’s Vineyard (known to the cognescenti simply as “the Vineyard”); its neighboring island of Nantucket (a bit smaller, but more of the same culture of mansions in the sand); and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island.

 

Now we learn that our president, Barack Obama, and his family have been seduced by the joys of Martha’s Vineyard. They are going to vacation there on a 28-acre farm (it last changed hands for over $20 million) where there is a place to shoot hoops, nearby golf and even a tee more less outside the kitchen door. It’s been vetted for fun and passed with flying colors. Bill Clinton vacationed there once when he was president.

 

But why, oh why, are the Obamas headed for the Vineyard? Sure there are a surprising number of liberals–mostly banker and real estate types from Manhattan–on the island, but what is the message?

 

Obama, one of the hardest-working presidents, deserves a swell holiday. He deserves to shoot hoops, play golf and swim without having his swim trunks analysed in The New York Post. But where?

 

The thing is that it is important where the president and his family grill their hot dogs: It is not trivial. Presidential vacations can be transformative, putting obscure places on the map or giving a financial boost where it is needed. It is unlikely that too many of the summer people on Martha’s Vineyard are about to be foreclosed on.

 

There is an historic dimension, or tail, to presidential recreation. Lincoln used to ride across Washington to a cottage on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, now a tourist attraction. Fourteen miles up the Potomac River from the Chesapeake Bay, Piney Point, Md., was the rustic retreat of Presidents James Monroe, Franklin Pierce and Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt put Warm Springs, Ga., on the map by taking the waters there.

 

Before the two big Ts that dominate presidential life in our time–television and terrorism–it was possible for presidents to travel more or less incognito. Teddy Roosevelt was extremely mobile and once spent a three-week presidential vacation hunting bear at Glenwood Springs, Colo.

 

Also, the physical White House was less demanding of the presidential presence than it is today. The telegraph made it possible for presidents to leave the country without worrying about 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So it was that Woodrow Wilson was able to attend the Paris peace talks after World War I and present his 14-point program for world peace, and FDR was able to meet with Winston Churchill around the world, from Tehran to Yalta to Quebec.

 

But those were working trips. Presidential vacations are about getting away from it all. You can do that nicely on the Vineyard, but would it not have been nicer if Obama had chosen some equally alluring spot that needed a presidential boost? Remember the White House entourage spends money, and so do the press spends (less and less) and the security apparatus. A presidential visit is good for business in most places but of little account on the Vineyard.

 

There are many beautiful and deserving places where the presidential cavalcade can leave a mark. For example, how about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? It is a glorious vacation destination, and it has not really had a boost since Esther Williams made those ridiculous swimming movies on Mackinac Island in the 1940s.

 

More to the point, Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Hoops and links are ubiquitous all across America, Plenty of them in Michigan.  –For North Star Writers Group

Boneyard for the Graybeards

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He moves across the lobby of Washington’s Metropolitan Club with the assurance of a man in his own environment. This is the habitat of party elders, Republican and Democratic. This is their comfort zone– safe, secure, orderly and predictable. This is where graybeards lunch, scheme and reminisce. It is as someone once called it: a hotbed of social rest.

Here on the well-worn Persian carpets, men and women of achievement in many fields, not the least politics, talk over unexceptional food, always with an eye for another grandee who deserves a wave across the dining room.

The man who just entered the lobby is a Republican through and through. He has done a lot for the party; has advised at the highest levels, since the Reagan presidency; and has been rewarded with a major ambassadorship. He will know a lot of people in the dining room on any day and even more will know him.

To dine at the Metropolitan Club is to step back to a time when eminent graybeards—yes, they were almost exclusively men and almost all lawyers–worked behind the scenes to help presidents and their parties. Names like Barbour, Clifford and Cutler come to mind.

Now lobbyists now whisper in influential ears, and the doyens of the Metropolitan Club are not in demand. Like the Georgetown dinner party, some things are now in the past.

There is no time for profound consideration, no time to weigh the data and no time to exercise institutional memory. Omar Khayyam’s moving finger writes very fast now; so to deal with new situations and crises, politicians fall back on old ideology. “Is it progressive?” ask Democrats. “What is the free-market solution​?” ask Republicans.

Blame the warp-speed news cycle, and its overemphasis on politics over programs; the quick response over data and rumination. The relentless news machine wants speedy answers, everything in an instant.

A few blocks from the Metropolitan Club, the bloggers and twitterers in the White House press briefing room parse and comment upon the words of press secretary Robert Gibbs just as fast as he speaks. This is a de facto system where the trap is constantly sprung for the gaffe not the substance. If no gaffe is likely to occur, induce one.

Step forward Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times with her race-heavy question about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This happened at the end of the last presidential press conference, when the chosen reporter usually goes for something light or fun. Not Ms. Sweet.

A few seconds at the end of that press conference eclipsed President Barack Obama’s earnest but dull defense of his health care reform proposals; eclipsed the previous 55 minutes. Obama was in a place he did not want to be, and he would stay there for weeks. No time to ask some party elder how best to handle the situation.

If Democratic grandees are sidelined in the new news-driven politics, then Republican statesmen, like the man at the Metropolitan, have been sent into exile. They can write an occasional op-ed and argue at think-tank seminars. But for now, the party has been hijacked by its broadcast wing. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin have become the censors of the party. They intimidate its elected officials and will brook nothing they hear from their own wise counselors.

A National Conversation on Government

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There’s a bear in our backyard. He’s often there and just two days ago he walked, well, lumbered down the road in front of our house, turned up the driveway, and unhurriedly disappeared into some woods behind the house.

 

It was alarming to see the bear in the road. Foxes and deer are killed there with great frequency by cars. I want the bear to be safe, so my wife and I wondered who in the government we should call. There must be a program for bears who are penetrating built-up areas (we live only 45 miles from Washington, D.C.)

 

We haven’t yet called the government. Which one, federal, state or county? Which department? Agriculture, animal welfare, forestry, land conservation, or just our congressman and let him worry about the electoral dynamics of saving bears? There may be enough people worried about bears becoming roadkill that there are votes in it.

 

The main thing is that somewhere in the enormous apparatus of government, I know there is someone who worries about errant bears. In this case, I’m glad that we have big government so that when I decide who to call, someone will tell me what to do about my ursine neighbor.

 

But there’s the rub also. What’s the role of government in society and how much should it do, or how much should we expect it to do? You’d think this had been hammered out in the seminal events of the 18th century.

 

If we’re going to have a national conversation about anything, let’s have it about the role of government. What’s proper for government to shoulder and what should be done in the private sector?

 

The ongoing debate about health care highlights the clear divisions in the country about the responsibilities of government. Liberals, it seems to me, want the government in there, offering its own insurance. Conservatives want the government out, but they want it to do a few things on the way through the door such as forcing private insurers to take patients with pre-existing conditions, assuring greater portability and granting relief to small employers.

 

Liberals and conservatives alike say they want less government, but they have very different ideas about what that reduced government should do; so the government, under both Republicans and Democrats, grows.

 

Liberals think that too much of our national treasure goes into weapons systems, defensive and aggressive. Conservatives think that the government can’t get anything right and should largely be supplanted by the private sector.

 

Here are some big things that could be privatized, although whether they would be better is unknown: air traffic control, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the postal service, the administration of the national parks and the Government Printing Office. Government should be prohibited from competing with the private sector in small things like publishing periodicals and books, and organizing conferences.

 

But does anyone think that the National Institutes of Health should be handed over to the pharmaceutical industry?

 

Or consider these problems which, somewhere one hopes, the government is working on: the effects of rising sea levels; the over-fishing of the oceans; the notorious Panama disease, which is wiping out bananas; the mysterious and massive death of U.S. honeybees; and the proliferation of feral pythons, which are endangering cats, dogs and possibly people in Florida and soon across the South.

 

Without government research, we wouldn’t have the Internet, Velcro, the aeroderivitive turbine, or the cute little winglets on jet airplanes which make them less lethal to other jet airplanes. If, like the Europeans, we decided the government should get behind the arts, we’d have many opera companies to rival the New York Met and provincial theater would boom.

 

I’m ambivalent about health care reform because I’m on Medicare and I think it’s dandy; but I wish my wife’s insurance wasn’t so expensive. Right now, I’d like someone in the government–someone with real clout–to do something to keep the bear in my backyard from becoming roadkill. Will he join the sad roster of bears, deer and foxes that became roadkill because the government didn’t care? I tell you it would be different if bears voted.  — For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

The Health Care Fix That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Workaround is a made-up word that came to us from the computer industry – at least, that is how it came into general usage. In that industry, a workaround can be a crafty piece of engineering to get the results you want without infringing on someone else’s patent.

 

Watching President Barack Obama at last week’s prime-time news conference, one had the feeling that he was engaged in a workaround. He was selling a vague health care reform proposal. His spiel was very long because he was selling something that is still a work in progress. Worse: Whatever Obama gets is not going to be the real thing. It is going to be a workaround.

 

One has the feeling that congressional pusillanimity has the Democrats and their leader working around what at heart they know is the only solution to the challenge of health care – a strong federal role. Call it the solution that dare not speak its name, like Oscar Wilde’s love.

 

One had the feeling in the East Room last week that the president wanted to lay down the burden of political gamesmanship and say, “National systems work from Taiwan to Norway, Canada to Australia; why, oh why can’t we face this reality?”

 

The first answer is that no one has the courage to face the Banshee wails of “socialism” that already echo from the right and would intensify to the sound of a Category 3 hurricane. Politically, it would be seen as a bridge too far. Had Obama said in the presidential campaign that he was for a single-payer option, the Democrats on Capitol Hill might have had the temerity to investigate what works remarkably well in Belgium and Japan, among dozens of other countries.

 

Globally, the single-payer option – or, let’s face it, nationalization – has brought in universal coverage at about half of what the United States spends today; let alone what we will spend with the clumsy hybrid that the president is selling and Congress is concocting.

 

Under nearly all state-operated systems, private insurers have a role. My friends in Britain and Ireland all have private insurance for bespoke medicine above that available on the state system. Sure, state systems are criticized, especially in Italy (along with everything else), but not one country that has a state system has made any political move to repeal it. State systems are popular.

 

In Britain, where I have had most experience with the National Health Service, it is the third rail of their politics. Even the great advocate of free enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, did not dare to even think of touching it. Every British Tory wants to make it more efficient, but none wants to repeal it. Thatcher repealed anything that had the whiff of socialism about it and privatized much, including the railways, but the health system was sacrosanct.

 

The issue should not be whether we can keep every insurer alive and whether we should continue to burden employers with the health care of their staffs and their families, but whether a new system will deliver for all Americans at reasonable cost.

 

It is probably too late to rationalize the system all at once. There are too many interests, too much money at stake and a pathological fear of government, fanned by the loud few. No matter that the Tennessee Valley Authority works well, that the Veterans Administration is a larger, and probably better, state program than those in many countries. It is not just in health care that Congress and the administration are engaged in workaround. Cap-and-trade in energy is another piece of avoidance.

Utility chief, after utility chief, after utility chief–among them, John Rowe of Exelon and James Rogers of Duke–has said that a simple carbon tax would be more effective and cheaper than cap-and-trade. But the same people who yell “socialist” get severe arrhythmia at the mention of “tax.” Workaround.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

Obama Diagnosis, Won’t Prescribe

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President Barack Obama starts from a pretty compelling argument: In the rich industrialized nations, the rich and the poor should be able to afford to get sick. They surely will. Disease does not means test.

 

But after that, the health care argument gets away from the president. In fact, he hasn’t made his own argument.

 

This week Obama has argued passionately for reform, as he did in his prime-time news conference Wednesday night. But we have yet to hear his personal view of what an American health care system should look like. One suspects that it is the solution that dare not speak its name: a single-payer system, a government system. Yes, a–dread word–socialist system.

 

The empirical evidence from Australia to Ireland, Canada to Norway is that this is the way to go. Every country with a national health service pays less for health care per capita than does the United States. And not one has contemplated canceling their system.

 

Yet it is a concept that may be too radical for Americans. It also may be too late in the evolution of the health care industry to nationalize the system.

 

Canada had the most difficulty nationalizing health care of any major country, and is still groaning. Canada did not plunge in; it waded into a state system, and put it all together in an age of sophisticated medicine. But it is not without problems: for example, Canada failed to comprehend that if everyone who needs to see a doctor sees one, more doctors will be needed. There is a chronic shortage of doctors in Canada.

 

Britain, by contrast, nationalized its health system after World War II, when medicine was simpler and the process was easier. It was also a time of post-war idealism. Today, like most state systems, it functions well enough but not perfectly. Well enough for Britons living abroad, including in the United States, to fly home for major surgery.

 

The world of single-payer does allow for private insurance, and it is flourishing in countries like Ireland. This provides a second tier for those who feel the basic system is too rudimentary. Under this arrangement if you want a procedure for a non-life-threatening ailment, which would require a long wait in the state system, you visit the specialist–called a consultant in the British Isles–and the insurance company picks up the tab. The idea is that the well-off get what they want, and the rest get what they want.

 

Obama’s problem is that he can diagnose the problem but has failed to prescribe a solution that he appears to believe in. He is waiting for Congress to produce something that he can sign onto, called reform, and that will not expand the budget. Where European and some Pacific countries have allowed private systems to piggyback on state systems, Congress is struggling with the reverse and the president is going along. Congress is planning to have the state piggyback on the employer-paid system.

 

The idea that employers should carry the health care burden probably goes back to the 19th century when railroads, coal mines and ships found it best to employ a doctor to keep workers on the job. Today, it is an incongrous burden on American firms in an age of globalization.

 

The three principal schemes for a new day in health care seek to preserve private insurance as primary, mandate portability, demand that commercial insurers do not reject pre-existing conditions, and provide some kind of safety net from the government. And, yes, the whole new edifice will be revenue-neutral.

 

At his press conference, Obama was ebullient, funny at times–the very picture of a man about to get what he wants. By contrast, in the halls of Congress, the lawmakers who are supposed to deliver this package are despondent. They do not know what the president will accept and are not persuaded that huge federal spending will not result. There is real political fear on Capitol Hill. Wednesday night did not allay it.