“Ebola Politics”: Let Obama — And Frieden — Do Their Jobs
If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then even the possibility of infection with Ebola should do the same — for all of us. Instead we seem easily distracted by attempts to blame President Obama and scapegoat the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Republican politicians and media loudmouths demand the resignation of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC director, evidently because he refused to endorse a West African travel ban.
They’re all dead wrong.
First, Obama is following precisely the correct approach in addressing the outbreak with his order to dispatch American troops to Liberia. At this stage, no force except the U.S. military is capable of getting the situation in West Africa under control. The men and women of the medical corps can swiftly set up emergency tented facilities in every Liberian county, while security personnel begin to restore order and prevent panicked destruction.
The president didn’t foresee this outbreak, but neither did anyone else, principally because every earlier Ebola outbreak had been contained within a few rural villages. While his order to send troops isn’t popular – and nobody likes the idea of sending our troops into danger – he made a difficult but wise choice. (Our British and French allies have agreed to do the same in Sierra Leone and Guinea, respectively.)
Why are the unique characteristics and large scale of the U.S. military so vital now? Simply because no other force can adequately handle the logistical and safety requirements of this chaotic, perilous undertaking. To take just one example: Both our troops and the local health care workers will need an enormous supply of protective gear known as Personal Protective Equipment – each of which must be not just discarded, but carefully destroyed after a single use.
More broadly, the effort to contain Ebola needs very well-trained, well-organized, and well-disciplined people on the ground – which is to say, an army. Our military personnel are the best in the world, and will be able to provide leadership and guidance to the Liberians, organizing local health workers to restore order amid chaos and fear.
No organization except the U.S. military possesses the capacity to deal with such problems.
Second, the calls for Dr. Frieden to resign by Republican members of Congress more resemble cheap midterm campaigning than intelligent policymaking. Although the CDC has not functioned perfectly in the current crisis, its director is certainly the most qualified and experienced figure to stem a threatened outbreak of infectious disease. His expertise is not merely on paper, either.
During four of the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York, when multi-drug resistant tuberculosis was taking a terrible toll, Dr. Frieden oversaw the program that eventually controlled TB and reduced cases by 80 pecent. For five years he worked in India, dispatched by the CDC to work with the World Health Organization to control TB in that country – where his efforts helped to provide treatment for at least 10 million patients and saved as many as 3 million lives. Those are among the reasons that President Obama appointed him in the first place – and why he still deserves far more confidence than the partisan screamers in Congress and on cable television now attacking him.
Now is the wrong time for politicians and pundits to harass the Pentagon and the CDC, as they address the difficult task at hand — which will require many weeks of intensive struggle. There will be plenty of opportunity for recriminations later, if that still seems necessary.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the country faced what felt like an existential crisis, many public figures, especially Republicans, urged everyone to put national unity and cooperation ahead of partisan bickering. It would be good if, just this once, they would follow their own advice.
What we will need in the months to come is a fresh assessment of our foreign aid programs. We need to understand why our traditional stinginess does both our country and our children a terrible disservice. Our best hope for survival, in the long term, is to notice how small our world has become – and to recognize that protecting our fellow human beings everywhere is the only way to protect ourselves.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, October 17, 2014
“Complicated Lies?”: The Amazingly Two-Faced Mitch McConnell
Alison Lundergan Grimes has been getting a lot of grief lately, not least from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which pulled the plug on her campaign yesterday. Her team quickly sent out a press release noting that she has $4.4 million in cash on hand, which the release said was “more than any Democrat in a competitive U.S. Senate race.” So she probably has enough to see her through to the end, but obviously, the DSCC move isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
Even so, I’d like to pay her a compliment: I can’t conceive of how she managed to sit there next to Mitch McConnell at that debate Monday night and hear him say some of the things he said without her head exploding. That took admirable self-control.
I’m not sure which suffix to add to “shame” to better describe McConnell’s performance: Was it –less, or was it –ful? Remember Mitt Romney during the first debate of 2012, how he routinely said “my position is X” (invariably a more centrist posture) when for the preceding umpteen months his position had been the much more right-wing Not X? Well, McConnell made Romney look like an ironman of forthright constancy. So this is how, with a 30-year Senate record that you’d think you might be able to boast about, you win reelection: By completely misrepresenting who you’ve been for the last six years, and by saying “Obama” every 45 seconds.
Misrepresentations were numerous, but let’s just zero in on student loans. Grimes raised the issue and noted the rising costs of the loans, which Congress hasn’t addressed. McConnell responded that the Senate had taken care of the issue in a bipartisan fashion. But it didn’t. The Elizabeth Warren-sponsored bill failed in the Senate by four votes, getting only 56 yeas but needing 60 to end debate and make it to the floor. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats, but McConnell wasn’t one of them. And McConnell said publicly at the time that he was against Warren’s plan because it was “designed to fail” since it would raise taxes on rich people.
McConnell similarly talked out of both sides of his mouth on the minimum wage, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other issues. And he, too, dodged a question, and it was one that’s rather more important than the one Grimes dodged about whether she had voted for President Obama. McConnell wouldn’t say whether climate change is real and whether humans contribute to it, so if he wins, Kentuckians will have the pleasure of knowing who their senator voted for in 2012 while he spends the next six years positioning himself to the right of Exxon-Mobil (which at least supports a carbon tax) and blocking any attempt to do anything about global warming.
McConnell’s real howler, of course, had to do with Obamacare. As you may know by now, he said yes, sure, keep Kynect, the state’s roaringly successful health-insurance exchange set up under the health-care law. After all, it’s “just a website.”
This was the moment when I was wondering how Grimes’s head could possibly stay in one piece. As McConnell well knows, Kynect is not just a website. It’s a state health-care program that citizens happen to be able to access through a website. Kentuckians go on to the Kynect website to see what types of insurance coverage are available to them under the Kynect program, which exists solely because of Obamacare. So if you repeal Obamacare “root and branch,” which is still McConnell’s position, you can leave the Kynect website up, but those coverage options people find via the site will no longer exist. Saying keep the website but kill the program is like saying that someone can keep that nice-looking home page that says “Google,” but it just won’t perform searches anymore.
It’s amazing, the audacity of it. If what Grimes did on the Obama-vote question is “disqualifying,” as Chuck Todd put it, then what is an incumbent senator telling a whopper like this? Given that half a million Kentuckians have signed up for insurance through Kynect, isn’t this just a little more important? What’s worse is that he knows he can get away with saying something like that because he is well aware that the explanation of why he’s lying is a little complicated for the average voter to take in. The media just aren’t set up to correct the record very well on things like this. I read a handful of write-ups of the debate from within Kentucky yesterday, and none among the few I read actually burrowed into an explanation of McConnell’s lie. It just gets summarized as a “testy exchange” or some such.
There was one event during this campaign season when McConnell did tell his audience the truth. But that didn’t happen in Kentucky in front of voters. It happened over the summer in California, at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort, where rooms run upwards of $500 a night, at a gathering put together by the Koch brothers. McConnell has been saying on the trail that if he wins and the GOP takes the Senate, he’ll open up the amendment process, implying that he’d permit votes on issues Democrats wanted to push—notably, of course, raising the minimum wage.
But behind closed doors at the Koch event, McConnell said the opposite, promising the 1 percenters that, should they win, his Republicans are “not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage [inaudible]—cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that’s a great message for retirees; uh, the student-loan package the other day, that’s just going to make things worse, uh.”
That was—speaking of comparisons to Mitt Romney—McConnell’s 47 percent moment. The sentiment is not as clearly put, so it wasn’t as usable for the opposition. But that was the probable (let’s face it) future majority leader saying to his real base: Don’t worry, boys, I got you covered.
That is how he will operate if he becomes majority leader. An inspiring campaign, all right.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 15, 2014
“Despite The Non-Stop Coverage”: Surprise; Americans Are Confident In Government’s Ability To Handle Ebola
This morning the White House announced that Ron Klain, who was formerly the chief of staff to Vice President Biden, will coordinate the government’s response to Ebola. Klain will be the “czar” Republicans were asking for, I suppose because they had to demand the administration do something it wasn’t yet doing (thus is the nature of opposition). Which seems like a perfectly reasonable idea — you can never have too much coordination, and Klain is generally respected for his organizational skills.
But as much as Republicans have been arguing that everything is spinning out of control and the government isn’t protecting us from a deadly disease that might just bring about a zombie apocalypse, it turns out that the public isn’t going quite as crazy as you might think.
Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of people who are reacting irrationally to a disease that has so far infected a grand total of two people in this nation of 316 million, both of whom were health care workers treating a man dying of Ebola (if that doesn’t describe you, you’re safe). But the growing number of Ebola polls shows that the public actually has a pretty good amount of confidence that the government can handle this.
That’s not what you might think if you tuned into the panic-a-thon that is cable news, or even much other news. Every evening news show is leading with Ebola every night, and every newspaper has multiple stories every day about the disease. There’s a danger that we could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which the public is portrayed as losing their collective minds, which makes it more likely that they will end up doing so.
But let’s look at what they’re actually saying. It turns out that on some questions, partisanship has a big impact, which is actually encouraging in a way. It tells us that Ebola is much like other issues, where politics provides the filter through which things are being viewed. Whether it’s the economy or health reform or national security, Republicans are always going to be less likely to express confidence in the ability of a government run by Democrats to do anything right (and vice-versa).
So, via Eric Boehlert, in the latest Washington Post poll, 62 percent of respondents said they were very confident or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to respond to an Ebola outbreak. Among Democrats, the number was 76 percent, while among Republicans it was a still-healthy 54 percent. A Pew Research Center poll taken two weeks ago found something similar: 69 percent of Democrats said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the government’s ability to handle Ebola, while 48 percent of Republicans agreed. Pew pointed out that in 2005, when George W. Bush was president, the same question was asked about bird flu and the numbers were reversed (with Democrats then expressing even less confidence than Republicans do now).
That tells a story not of widespread public hysteria but of rather ordinary partisanship. And a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll also shows a more reasonable public than you might expect if you were just watching the panic-a-thon on cable news. Among the questions Kaiser asked was this:
Which do you think is more likely: Ebola will spread and there will be a widespread outbreak in the U.S.; or Ebola will be contained to a small number of cases in the U.S.?
Ebola will be contained: 73
There will be a widespread outbreak: 22
And people in both parties expressed confidence in the Centers for Disease Control, with 79 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans saying they’d have confidence in the CDC to contain the disease and prevent if from spreading if there were a case of Ebola in their area.
As a news story, Ebola lends itself perfectly to sensationalistic, ratings-grabbing news. It’s mysterious, threatening, dramatic, and carries the theoretical potential for global disaster. But so far, despite the non-stop coverage and Republicans’ insistence that chaos reigns, most of the public seems to think that our government is capable of handling it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 17, 2014
“Deception Carries No Meaningful Risk”: Mega-Blitz Of Ad Spending Makes It Easier For Candidates To Lie
Today the New York Times reports that Republicans are benefiting from a money surge that could give them a boost in all those tight Senate races, and the article probably brought a smile to many Republican faces. The truth is that it’s probably too late for money in these amounts to change much of anything either way.
But this is significant, because it highlights how current campaigns are now getting hit by such a massive blizzard of spending and advertising that for candidates, accountability has become all but impossible and deception carries no meaningful risk.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
All told, in seven races for which both Democrats and Republicans provided complete fund-raising totals by Wednesday evening — Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and North Carolina — Republicans held more cash in six of them, with a net advantage of about $7 million. At the same time, Democrats had booked more advertising from Sept. 29 through Election Day in at least five of those races, with the biggest advantages in North Carolina and Iowa, according to a Republican tracking media purchases.
In Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia and Iowa, Republican contenders posted their best fund-raising quarter of the year. In Iowa, the Republican candidate, Joni Ernst, who narrowly leads in polling, raised $6 million, more than double the amount taken in by her Democratic opponent, Representative Bruce Braley, and reported three times as much in cash on hand than Mr. Braley. Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas reported raising $3.8 million, far more than the Democratic incumbent, Senator Mark Pryor, who took in $2.2 million. In Colorado, Representative Cory Gardner raised $4.5 million and reported $1.4 million more in cash on hand than Senator Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent.
If you don’t live in one of these states it may be hard to appreciate the incredible volume of political ads television viewers have already endured in recent months. A count from the Wesleyan Media Project of television ads shows that in just one week, some 14,000 ads were aired in North Carolina, 13,000 in Iowa, 11,000 in Kentucky, and so on. Buying a few hundred more ads in one of these states is like walking up to people who have been standing in the middle of a monsoon and firing a squirt gun at them.
Meanwhile, the total spending so far in these races is enormous, as these data from the Center for Responsive Politics show:
By the time the race is over, the spending in, for example, North Carolina will probably total at least $75 million. Is another million or two going to be transformative? Probably not.
The important thing here is that all of this spending makes real accountability a lot harder. The candidates know that any forum where they might actually be held accountable will inevitably be drowned out by all the ads. For instance, in a debate yesterday Cory Gardner had to endure a grilling by a couple of obviously exasperated reporters over the fact that Gardner keeps denying that the “Personhood” bill he sponsored in Congress actually does what it says it does. He bobbed and weaved, and the footage looks really bad. But is Gardner particularly worried? I doubt it. He’s up by a couple of points in the polls, and how many people actually watched that debate? He has thousands of opportunities to get his message out his way.
Nor, I suspect, is Mitch McConnell worried that he’ll pay a price for trying to fool people in Kentucky into thinking that you can repeal the Affordable Care Act “root and branch,” but they’ll still get to keep Kynect, the hugely successful ACA exchange. Voters don’t understand the distinction, and the media aren’t helping them get it. In the post-Citizens United world, there’s little to fear, so long as you and your allies have the money.
That isn’t to say that the media couldn’t impose some accountability if they truly wanted to. But it would take an agreement that a particular issue is important enough to warrant intense, repeated attention. And that, apparently, is something they only do for things that have little or no substantive importance, like whether a candidate will say who she voted for.
Thirty years ago, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary Peter Teeley was asked by a reporter about a lie Bush had told during his debate with Geraldine Ferraro. “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it,” he said. And if reporters then correct the falsehood? “So what?” Teeley responded. “‘Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.”
The principle today is the same, but the information environment has changed. Candidates are no more afraid of accountability than they were, but now it’s because they’re drowning voters in advertising. And they can still say anything they want.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 16, 2014
“Tea Party’s Ebola Paranoia”: Why GOP’s Fear-Mongering Is Just A Cynical Turnout Strategy
There’s good news in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday night: Most Americans believe the government is ready to handle a possible Ebola outbreak, even as a second Dallas health worker has contracted the disease. But if you want to understand why the GOP is fear-mongering on the issue, you’ve got to analyze the poll results more closely.
Some 56 percent of Americans say the government is prepared to handle Ebola, including 61 percent of Democrats. But that number is flipped on its head when you ask Tea Party voters: 57 percent of them say the government is not prepared, as do 54 percent of rural voters. So two core components of the GOP red-state base coalition don’t trust the federal government, in the person of President Obama, to keep them safe – and there’s some political opportunity for Republicans in those numbers. When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz continues to insist “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” those are the voters he’s talking to.
The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent makes the excellent point that one big political benefit of Ebola to the GOP is that it gives them a theme with which to nationalize the election and make it about the perceived failures of President Obola – I mean Obama – especially in states like Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, where vulnerable Democrats have kept it close by focusing on local issues and their GOP opponents’ foibles. That’s why Thom Tillis is insisitng that Sen. Kay Hagan has “failed the people of North Carolina and the nation by not securing our border.”
The poll had more good news than bad for the forces of calm and reason: 49 percent of Americans thought the CDC is doing a good job, compared to 22 percent who said it wasn’t. Other polls have given us a little more to worry about: Last week’s Rutgers-Eagleton survey of New Jersey voters found that 69 percent were at least somewhat concerned about the disease spreading here – and that people who were paying the most attention to TV actually knew the least about the disease, and were the most frightened.
That’s an unusual finding: People who pay the most attention to coverage of a political issue usually know the most about it when polled. But not when it comes to Ebola. “The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding,” the pollster told reporters. No data on whether they were mostly watching Fox, where Bill O’Reilly is calling for the resignation of the respected CDC head Tom Frieden (the sensible Greta Van Susteren called her colleague out here.)
That same NBC/WSJ poll showed Republicans with a generic two point lead over Democrats in the coming midterm elections, 46-44. Again, the best thing I can say about continued polling is: It could be worse for Dems. That same poll had Republicans up by 7 at the same point, and they went on to deliver a “shellacking.” The poll was tied 45-45 in 2012, when President Obama won re-election and Democrats gained seats in Congress.
Even better, Democrats are leading Republicans among registered voters in the top-11 Senate races, 47 percent to 42 percent. So Democrats should expect losses, but it’s still not looking like a wave year. Unless Republicans can use Ebola and ISIS to drive out their voters, and Democratic voters stay home.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 15, 2014
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