OPINION
People don’t matter; business, industry do
T
he campaign to stiffen the spines of the handful of lawmakers who want to stop health insurance for 100,000 to 200,000 Arkansans who are in economic misery perfectly mirrors the hardright crusade, the most successful political movement of our time. Bankrolled and guided by some of the nation’s richest men and most profitable industries, it has metamorphosed into a latter-day populist movement, where working-class folks vote against their self-interest and brood about all the outrages visited upon them by liberals, elites, the government, scientists, feminists, gun haters and atheists, all led by a cunning and vicious president who only happens to be black. Everything that is going wrong in their lives or that they fear will go wrong is part of the Obama plot. For three years Obamacare has been the dark menace that is going to take their jobs, destroy their futures and bankrupt their country. The vast fortune of the Koch brothers and heavily bankrolled front groups with civic-sounding names — Americans for
Prosperity, the Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, the Center to Protect Patients’ Rights, Americans for Job ERNEST Security, AmeriDUMAS cans for Responsible Leadership — have kept Obamacare fears at the front of the national cerebral cortex. This month, little Arkansas has been the object of their attention and specifically the tea-party faction in the Arkansas legislature that wants to end the so-called “private option,” a plan devised by Arkansas Republicans to buy private health insurance for some 200,000 citizens whose incomes are so low they cannot afford to pay any of the premiums for a health policy. Obamacare anticipated that the government would pay hospitals and doctors for their care, as it does with most other Medicaid beneficiaries, but the Republicans, or many of them, thought it better that they enjoy the benefits of the real Obamacare — the private health insurance exchanges.
Back in Clintonland
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ack in 1993, a Washington Post reporter asked me which Clinton was smarter, Bill or Hillary. As a magazine journalist long-residing in Arkansas, I’d never covered state government and would have described the President and First Lady as friendly acquaintances, nothing more. I said that we had a saying in the Central Arkansas Beagle Club that you can’t train no dog that’s smarter than you. Since both Clintons clearly topped me in the IQ department, I had no way to judge their relative brainpower. Needless to say, this was the wrong answer, deeply violating journalistic protocol. Making glib pronouncements about near strangers is what we do. So when I read that Hillary told her friend Diane Blair that the press has “big egos and no brains,” I’m neither shocked nor offended. Is there anybody in politics who doesn’t think that? Anybody in the world? Nor was I astonished that Hillary admitted to her friend during the 1996 Whitewater media feeding frenzy that “I know I should do more to suck up to the press … I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos, I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I’m just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my
own terms.” And so she did. If you’ve forgotten, 1996 was the year all the best minds in the WashGENE ington press, heedLYONS ing Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic prosecutors, were predicting her imminent criminal indictment. To publicize an excerpt from James B. Stewart’s Whitewater book “Blood Sport,” Time published a cover photo of the First Lady that looked like a vampire movie poster. Maybe you remember Stewart, the eminent financial journalist who appeared on Nightline, NPR and anywhere else they’d have him, gravely accusing Hillary of bank fraud — all based, as it turned out, upon his own failure to read the second page of a two page loan document. Last I heard the eminent Judge Starr, once ticketed for the U.S. Supreme Court, was president of some Texas bible college. So yeah, Hillary won on her own terms. Now something called the Washington Free Beacon, which unearthed these nuggets from the collected papers of the late Diane Blair, the accomplished University of Arkansas professor who was Hillary’s dearest friend and confidante, pronounces her “ruthless” and a
If nine members of the Senate — only 7 percent of the legislature — will stand firm at this month’s fiscal session and vote against the Medicaid appropriation, Obamacare foes think it will scuttle the program and score a huge symbolic victory nationally. Republican legislators who were backed by Koch and other front groups like Americans for Prosperity have been getting heat to stand against the private option, which they say is real Obamacare in Republican clothing. This week, the principal Koch group, Americans for Prosperity, which spent close to $2 million two years ago electing Arkansas Republicans and Obamacare foes, sent legislators a different message. Sensing that defeat of the program by a tiny minority might send a bad message for Republicans in an election year, the organization’s Arkansas chief said it would be all right to let the private option continue this year and then concentrate on killing it outright in 2015, after the election. Saturday, the state affairs manager for Grover Norquist’s lobby penned an op-ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which carries anti-Obamacare diatribes almost daily on its editorial page, even while its news pages carry moving accounts of people helped by Obamacare. He explained why it’s important for the nine Republicans to
be steadfast and kill the private option now. The piece betrayed the real interest of the movement, and it was not the sons and daughters of toil. The only reason anyone has for not killing the private option now, he suggested, is the chamber of commerce’s warning that doing so might cause a few large employers in Arkansas that do not offer health insurance to their employees to pay new federal taxes because their low-wage workers would lose their health coverage. Scaring people like that is a dastardly plot, he said. He reassured legislators and the public that they need not worry: The business owners are not likely to pay higher taxes if insurance for the poor ends abruptly and forever. Everything will be peachy again. But what about more than 100,000 Arkansans who will lose their ability to get medical attention when they need it and another 100,000 or so who are expected to sign up over the next two years? That is the only real issue at the legislature, not whether a few business owners might pay a little tax for not helping their low-wage workers get health care. The Americans for Prosperity agent never mentioned them, even obliquely. See, everyone knows that businessmen really count, but poor working stiffs? They’re just in the way.
“cutthroat political strategist.” This because she’d confided to Blair that President Clinton’s inability to “fire people, exert discipline, punish leakers,” and his lack of a strategy to deal with Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Arkansas state troopers and other partisan mercenaries made her crazy. “Inability to organize, make tough choices,” Blair wrote “drives her nuts.” Indeed, history records that it was Hillary, who once served on the staff of Watergate independent counsel Leon Jaworski, that warned her husband it would be a terrible mistake to agree to an open-ended inquisition to finesse a temporary political problem. No independent counsel, no Monica Lewinsky, no Linda Tripp, no Lucianne Goldberg, no blue dress. None of it. So if that’s ruthless, cutthroat political strategy, the Clinton White House could have used a lot more of it. So do I buy Hillary’s rationalization for Bill’s infamous sexual misbehavior? First, let me repeat something I wrote back then: Other people’s marriages are a foreign country where you don’t know the language. Second, this whole business of pundits hiding their own naughty secrets while moralizing about the sins of others is both hypocritical and sadistic. That said, no I don’t put much stock in that psychologist who told her that Bill’s
infidelity had its roots in his childhood, and that “most men with fidelity problems [were] raised by two women and felt conflicted between them.” I’d suggest it had its roots in his pants. Truth to tell, Bill Clinton’s behavior wasn’t so different from men in other occupations — athletes, musicians, actors, even the occasional professor — that attract groupies. (Journalists, of course, are universally known for their virtue.) Did she privately call Monica a “narcissistic loony toon?” Most wives would have said much worse. Bill Clinton once described the White House to a mutual friend as “the jewel of the federal penitentiary system.” At the time, I remember thinking: Well, you asked for it, pal. But then a politician’s life is incomprehensible to me. Blair summarized Hillary’s thinking in September 1998: “Ever since he took office they’ve been going thru personal tragedy ([the death of] Vince [Foster], her dad, his mom) and immediately all the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.” “[Hillary] didn’t realize toll it was taking on him,” Blair continued. “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying.” Well, she loves the man, is all I can say. And he’s damned lucky to have her. www.arktimes.com
FEBRUARY 20, 2014
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