Tom Price's Real Sin

If it's Friday in the Trump Era then it's apparently time for someone to get voted off the island. And just like clockwork this week it was Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price who got the hook. The headline reason for his departure was that he had racked up more than $400,000 in expenses taking private jets all over the place including having lunch with his son.

Liberals reacted to the news with a good measure of glee and I'm no exception. And the fact that Price's downfall was a metaphor for how so many of our contemporary elites can seems so detached from the lives of normal Americans and think they can behave anyway they damn well please made it even juicier.

But I think "PlaneGate", or whatever we are going to call it, analysis is a little bit shallow when it comes to Price's downfall, and shows the tendency of liberals to sometimes miss the big picture when it comes to politics.

Certainly racking up those bills was the catalyst for why Price was forced out. But it's pretty clear to me that this story is really about the failure of the GOP to be able to "repeal and replace" the ACA despite promising to do so for seven years and now finally controlling the federal government. This is going on for a number of reason, some of which are all about the nature of the GOP these days and have nothing to do with Price the man. But Donald Trump doesn't want to hear these sorts of excuses and nothing about his life before the White House, or tenure in it, points to him being willing to accept his own responsibility for failures either.

Hence Price gets the blame.

But while I think liberals are right to make fun of Price when it comes to his downfall, or the fact that the Trump White House really does seem to be like a reality TV show at times, I think that loses sight of a more important issue.

Price's real sin wasn't footing Uncle Sam with a bunch of bills for chartered jets to have a good time. Don't get me wrong, this is clearly a fairly gross and entitlted way to behave, and I suppose could be considered an abuse of his office to some degree. But this is honestly just small potatoes stuff.

Price's real sin is being a point man for the Trump Administration's long going campaign to wreck the ACA's system of state based insurance marketplaces for individuals without coverage to buy legally required insurance plans. It's been going on for a long time, and includes everything from Price using HHS money to buy ads telling people the ACA is terrible, to deciding to shut down the federally run marketplaces' websites for 12 hours a week, every week, for "maintenance."

On a local level here in Minnesota the Trump Administration has been engaging in a mixture of pointless foot dragging and hostage taking about if the state will be granted a waiver to help stabilize our state's marketplace with an ambitious "reinsurance" program approved by the legislature earlier this year. Governor Mark Dayton referred to the whole process of dealing with the Trump Administration about this in general and HHS in particular as "nightmarish."

And since Trump has said he's going to issue an executive order about health care sometime in the future these sorts of problems might honestly get worse. As Jonathan Bernstein put it recently:

...deliberate actions by the administration to dissuade people from getting the health insurance available by law, or to make it more difficult, are monstrous, and essentially without precedent. Barack Obama, upon inheriting a war he didn't support, did not choose to deliberately lose it. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush inherited plenty of liberal programs they didn't support, but they didn't try to undermine them at the expense of the American people.

Here's my big point. Price's jet setting is the sort of thing reporters love to cover. After all it's an easy to understand scandal that fits into all sorts of generic "politics" news stories. ("Area politician wastes your hard earned tax dollars blah blah blah" etc.) But the real harm here isn't that Price wasted some money, the military wastes money on poorly thought out boondoggles all the time after all. The real harm is making people pay more for health insurance and destabilize insurance markets out of a mixtures of spite and desire for short term political gain.

In other words the heavy focus on "corruption" is probably the wrong tactic for Democrats between now and election day 2018. Don't get me wrong, "PlaneGate" is a fun way to think of the downfall of a pompous and in my opinion bad man, and the grifting nature of Trump and his Royal Court is no small thing. But it's not clear to me that this is going to move any swing voters over the next 13 months. In fact Trump could easily blow this story off the front page by just getting into another Twitter fight with some professional athlete quite literally tomorrow.

I personally I am not a fan of the politics of "good government reform" (or googoo as we critics like to say) for these sorts of reasons. Trump's egregious violations of any possible ethical standard (Running a scam university! Refusing to pay small businesses in Atlantic City! The Access Hollywood tape thing!) were all great reasons for political elites to turn on him, but in this age of partisanship it didn't really move the needle when it came to the electorate. Accordingly Democrats are right to highlight things like Price's gluttony when it comes to travel budgets, but voters ultimately care about outcomes, not process. And as Hillary Clinton learned changes of "Corruption!" can be lobbed at pretty much anyone, even the heads of a charity that quite possibly saved millions of lives.

So have fun on Twitter mocking Price, I know I have, but focus on policy and outcomes if you want to win elections in the long run.
   

Hillary Wrote A Book

So in case you missed it, Hillary Clinton, yes the one and only, wrote a book about "What Happened" in 2016 and it's coming out next week. Personally I don't plan on reading it. Hillary likes to write doorstoppers as memoirs and this one apparently tips the scales at 463 pages.

But we are already getting reviews, takes on reviews, and arguments on Twitter about it. So I might as well jump in and give my two cents.

Again, I'm not going to read it, and really don't want to get into the weird parlor game of trying to psychoanalyze Hillary Rodham Clinton. But I will say that the preview/review CNN wrote a few days ago gives the picture of a lengthy book that basically gets it right.

To begin with it looks like we can now point out that people who keep claiming that Hillary won't "apologize" or "take ownership" of her loss are just being ahistorical. According to CNN the book has this paragraph:

I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want -- but I was the candidate...It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.

Honestly she's taken responsibility before, but hopefully we can finally end that dumb whinny talking point about "ownership" once and for all.

Likewise, apparently she spends a lot of time criticizing the choices of one time FBI director James Comey. We of course will never know what could have happened if Comey hadn't decided to throw his weight around about Anthony Weiner's laptop a few days before Halloween, or if the media hadn't decided that EMAILS! was a more important issue than all policy issues combined, what might have happened. But the evidence that Comey and media norms, not Dumb Robby Mook Being Dumb, was what tipped the scales is pretty strong.

Early today Matt Yglesias, who I am a big fan of, Tweeted out that "Even some very close Clinton allies I’ve spoken to have questioned the wisdom of picking at the primary sore like this right now." He's talking about the parts (of a 463 page book!) where Hillary Clinton has the temerity to criticize Bernie Sanders for among other things not being a Democrat.

I agree with Matt that re-fighting that old war is pretty stupid now that we are in the Age of Trump (if you really must know why I never "felt the Bern" Elie Mystal summed by my views pretty well, except I wouldn't be so harsh on Hillary). But Matt's criticism strikes me as being profoundly unfair when you get right down to it. In fact as far as I can as I can see it there's no possible way for her to behave that would make her critics give it a rest, so she might as well get her side of things on the record for everyone, including future historians, to be able to view.

Indeed trying to find the "correct" time for Hillary to release her book seems like a bit of a fool's errand to me. Here's basically how media reactions would go to any sort of hypothetical Hillary book about 2016 based on when it was released:

• Fall of 2017: I can't believe she is opening these old wounds!
• Spring of 2018: It's simply disgusting and outrageous that she puts her self and her damn book sales above the midterm elections!
• Winter of 2018-19: LOL, she's running, how pathetic. Sorry sweetie you had your chance and blew it.
• Spring of 2019: Typical Hillary, typical Clinton. She thinks she's more important than beating Trump!
• Fall of 2019: Can this old crone please shut up? We are talking about Booker vs Kamala!
• Spring of 2021: [In The New York Times columnist voice] "Even as her one time protegee Kirsten Gillibrand is being sworn in, Hillary's desperate need to hog the spotlight showed yet again as word surfaced she's finally publishing a book about what went wrong in 2016..."

It's kind of funny how nobody cares how John Kerry acted after he lost the "easily winnable election" in 2004 and instead of going to live as a monk on an island in the Black Sea and contemplate his sins did this. Just like it's also funny nobody cares that John Edwards went back to practicing law. And funny that Richard M. Nixon, one of the most destructive American politicians of the 20th Century, wrote books too.

A lot of smarter people than myself have written about what Hillary Clinton's rise and fall says about how American society responds to the idea of women in power, and indeed gender itself in our society. I won't try to add to that work. But I would add that the contempt towards a woman involved in American politics since the Watergate Hearings having the temerity to publish a book probably has something to do with the how so much of culture treats political losers.

Probably the greatest book ever written about American Presidential Politics is Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes" about the road to the 1988 presidential election. After spending over a thousand pages getting to meet one time presidential hopefuls named Dick Gephardt, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, and some guy named Joe Biden we arrive at Election Day. Cramer puts witnessing the day and it's events in this way:

Blood-roar. . . the nation seemed to demand it, or at least to expect it, in the closing days. How else to explain those gatherings of thousands where the candidate screamed and people screamed back, no one said anything, and the papers wrote it up as the campaign "picking up steam". . .blood-roar homage to our political lineage, to vengeful northern conquerors and their forest-gods (Normans, surely-French cuisine for state dinners, with five forks gleaming beside each plate, but give us the heads of our enemies on pikes)...A hundred time, his [Bush's] White Men, or his family, old school friends, or someone else who mistook breeding for behavior, tried to steer Bush off the Pledge of Allegiance, or Willie Horton, Crime 'n' Commies, Furloughs, Flags and Read My Lips! It was ugly, brainless, Bush had worn it out. . . but Bush kept at it. He understood what the forest-gods demanded, what the people wanted in a chief, his enemies felled and bleeding, drawn limb from limb and thrown to earth for the people to dance, in blood-roar. America defiles its losers. [emphasis added]

Trump of course is no Loser. Trump is the ultimate Winner. Trump is the man who gets to skate through life armed with daddy's money, the celebrity worship of the New York press, TV shows, book deals, casino swindles, four draft deferments from the Army, and a retinue of courtiers paid to never tell him no. All the while leaving a trail of wreckage in his Winner wake that he'll never be called to account for.

Our new president would never be the sort of loser who'd dedicate her life to public service and a belief that the world can be made better one step at a time. Let alone take responsibility for something.

No no no. That's Loser talk. Only Winners can fix the evils and ills of the world, through great deals, biggly.

That seems to be in part why the contempt seems to never end. Hillary was a woman who came so incredibly close to true power, it was almost in the palm of her hand! But, alas, she perhaps overreached, and fell. And now it seems as part of our media culture for us to be told why we need to to embrace the blood-roar and show why we defile our losers so much.