A Home Run for Health Care?

Under the oddest byline ever, an unlikely trio tells New York Times OpEd readers today how to fix American health care--by applying the expertise of baseball's number crunchers to medical treatment.

A skeptical reader starts with a bit of resistance based on the track record of the authors: Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, who finished third out of four teams in their division this year; Newt Gingrich, author of "Contract With America," the failure of which led to an exit from Congress in disgrace; and John Kerry, who couldn't counter the swiftboating that resulted in George W. Bush's reelection in 2004.

How these losers got together, the OpEd editors explaineth not, but the essence of their argument is that computer analysis of treatment will revolutionize the American health care system, which now "behaves like a hidebound, tradition-based ball club that chases after aging sluggers and plays by the old rules: we pay too much and get too little in return.

"To deliver better health care, we should learn from the successful teams that have adopted baseball’s new evidence-based methods. The best way to start improving quality and lowering costs is to study the stats."

Nobody would begrudge more information in any field, including medical treatment, but we may be forgiven for skepticism about the formulations of Gingrich and Beane, two self-promoting reformers without results, and for wondering how staid old John Kerry fell in with this crew.

Meanwhile, health insurers have done enough damage in hampering doctors from using their best judgment and experience by nagging them with cost-benefit analysis, where outcomes are more serious than winning or losing ball games.

Obama Breaks the 50 Percent Barrier

As Wall Street numbers tank, the Democratic candidate rises past a milestone number in the campaign, leading John McCain by 52 to 43 percent in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

This "It's the economy, stupid" feat outdoes Al Gore and John Kerry, neither of whom broke the 50 percent barrier in pre-election polls while running against the Compassionate Conservative.

Part of the Obama bump may well come from his measured approach to the Congressional rescue effort, compared to McCain's yo-yo response from outrage and heads-will-roll to let's-do-it now.

Obama is taking a presidential stance of balancing the risks and rewards, while the former fighter pilot responds with his customary "let's shoot it down and ask questions later" mentality.

Voters who have been bombarded with attacks on Obama's "otherness" may be starting to feel that that risk is preferable to McCain's "more of the same." They may be watching more for signs of temperament than positions on issues in the first debate Friday night.

The Doubts-About-Obama Industry

The polls show a tightening race, reflecting how perniciously effective smear politics can still be. McCain campaign mud, at least for the time being, is filling in the blanks of an opponent largely unknown to some clueless segment of the electorate.

The dilemma for Obama is how to respond. Trying to stay about it all, as John Kerry did in 2004, is a losing strategy, but full-throttle counterattacks raise the risk of making Obama seem thin-skinned and easily rattled.

Ridicule is iffy. Yesterday the Democratic candidate got some mileage from tweaking McCain about his flipflop on tire inflation for better gas mileage, but too much of that could make him look unpleasantly sarcastic.

For the long haul, Barack Obama has to concentrate on defining himself and his politics for an electorate that wants change but at the same time is wary of risk. He should establish himself as strong enough to withstand smears and then let his surrogates and his eventual running mate deal with the most of the tactical back-and-forth.

Obama has to remember that, as much as he has excited millions of voters, there may be even more who know little about him and can be manipulated into seeing him as a dangerous choice. He has to make them see who he is and what he stands for.

Meanwhile, the doubt-raisers are getting more subtle. Yesterday, one of McCain's potential running mates, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, praised the Democrat ("Say what you will about Barack Obama," he told conservatives, "people gravitate when you have something positive to say"), but then attacked him for inexperience (“It is simply a matter of fact that less than four years ago he was a state legislator”).

Obama should leave it to others to point out that Pawlenty, who could be second in line to an aging president, was only a state legislator five years ago and concentrate on the "something positive" his presidency would offer Americans after eight years of Bush-Cheney negativity.

What's Wrong With Obama

Now we know the worst. Behind all the electoral enthusiasm for the Democratic front runner is a treasonous self-regard.

In today's New York Times, William Kristol explains it in his inimitable style. In declining to wear an American flag lapel pin as "a substitute...for true patriotism," which he defines as "speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security," Barack Obama is guilty of...moral vanity!

"What’s striking," Kristol instructs us, "is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good--too patriotic!--to wear a flag pin on his chest."

A surge of unity after 9/11 inspired Americans to display the flag--on their lapels and their lawns--after the trauma of an unthinkable attack. But Kristol's heroes--Bush, Cheney and Rove--converted that heartfelt feeling into a Neo-Con tool for waging preemptive war, trampling on civil liberties and winning elections by attacking their opponents' love of country.

In rejecting that definition of patriotism, Obama is embracing "the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry."

As a member of that fraternity, Obama can't expect to be pinned by William Kristol, who has belatedly pledged John McCain into the circle of true believers who wear their American hearts on their sleeves and their chests.

Bill Clinton's Bimbo Offensive

In attacking Barack Obama, the ex-President has gone past embarrassing into his own kind of seductive swiftboating.

Is there any difference in twisting the record of someone who opposed the Iraq war from Day One on behalf of an opponent who voted for it from smearing a man who fought and bled in Vietnam to benefit someone who dodged serving there?

More and more leading Democrats, including John Kerry, are complaining, but perhaps even worse than the cheap politics to which Bill Clinton has lowered himself is the insult of treating voters as too stupid to see through what he is doing--of wooing them like bimbos who will swallow anything.

In our sound-bite age, all politicians invert the truth occasionally, but it has become a modus operandi for the former President who once explained his distortions in the 1996 election to opponent Bob Dole with a smiling, "You gotta do what you gotta do."

Now, when political figures and reporters comment on his behavior, Bill Clinton gets testy as he did with a CNN correspondent who raised a question that led a former South Carolina Democratic chairman to compare his attacks to those of Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's mentor. "Shame on you," the prospective First Spouse says.

The ex-President must be even less charmed by ABC News' Jake Tapper's exegesis of how both Clintons tortured Obama's words about Ronald Reagan in a Las Vegas interview into meanings that were clearly not there.

But Bill Clinton seems exhilarated by it all. "I know you think it's crazy," he told a South Carolina crowd, "but I kind of like to see Barack and Hillary fight. They're flesh and blood people and they have their differences--let them have it."

The Clintons are letting Barack Obama "have it" with a truthiness that would make George W. Bush blush. As someone whom most Americans once respected and many admired said recently on the campaign trail, "Give us a break!"

Swift-Boating Congress

The man who wouldn’t fight for his country in Vietnam yesterday gave those who did false analogies about their war to the one he is now waging with the lives of another generation.

Be thankful for smalls favors that President Bush did not dress up in the flight jacket he wore for his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but his Iraq comparisons to Vietnam and World War II had no more reality than that Commander-in-Chief moment in 2003.

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Sen. John Kerry said after the speech.

Kerry knows first-hand about the Bush big-lie machine that is now gearing up to swift-boat Congress as it did his war record during the 2004 Presidential election and, before that, John McCain’s Vietnam experience in the primaries of 2000.

Now advertising will be aimed at lawmakers, especially Republicans, who face re-election next year. An interest group, Freedom’s Watch, is beginning a month-long, $15 million campaign to pressure wavering members of Congress to stay the Surge course. Ads will run in 20 states, in more than five dozen Congressional districts.

This bunch has no idea of how to run a war, but it is very good at smearing those fought one and those who want to stop the senseless carnage they started and can’t finish.

If George Bush ever takes time out from comparing himself to great leaders of the past, he might want to take a look at what a real military commander, Dwight Eisenhower said when leaving the Oval office:

“People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

Rove, the Coward

Unsaid in all the blather about Karl Rove’s leaving the White House is that, under all the macho geek bravado, he has been another prototypical Bush-Cheney patriot who, like his leaders, did everything possible to avoid bleeding for his country when he might have and later savaged those who did.

Dirty politics is galling enough, but a certified coward slandering the brave to win elections is pathological.

During the war in Vietnam, Rove slithered in and out of colleges to keep a 2-S deferment after drawing a draft lottery number making it likely he would be called. He got himself reclassified as a University of Utah student despite, according to Wikipedia, “being only a part-time student in the autumn and spring quarters of 1971...and dropping out of the university in June 1971.

“Rove was a student at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1971...but registrar's records show that he withdrew from classes during the first half of the semester. In December 1971 he was reclassified as 1-A. On April 27, 1972, he was reclassified as 1-H, or ‘not currently subject to processing for induction.’ The draft ended on June 30, 1973.”

This is the war record of the man who in 2000 slandered John McCain as mentally unstable after five years as a POW in Vietnam, in 2004 swift-boated John Kerry who fought and bled in the war Rove dodged and, most unspeakable of all, impugned the patriotism of Sen. Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm there.

It would take a team of psychologists to untangle the sickness in all this, but the late Mary McGrory summed it up with the Shakespearian, "He jests at scars that never felt the wound."

But Rove is a man of his times. Now we have to endure super-machismo war talk from Rudy Giuliani, who evaded Vietnam on the basis of his indispensability as a law clerk, Mitt Romney who spent that period as a Mormon missionary in France and Fred Thompson, who was too busy as an assistant prosecutor in Tennessee.

It’s not vital that Presidents and President-makers have defended the country in uniform, but it would help if they tried to understand and respect those who did.

Rove Legacy: Defining Deviancy Down

Trying to find meaning in Karl Rove’s political career, as so many observers are now doing, is like, to borrow Gen. David Petraeus’ expression about Iraq, “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Today the Washington Post asks: “(A)s Karl Rove resigns from the administration, a question lingers over his legacy: What, exactly, did the architect build?”

The answer is nothing. There is no Rove philosophy, doctrine, strategy. The man is the sum of his ugly tactics, a college dropout who spent a working lifetime winning, buying or stealing votes by all possible means--a porcine rooter in the garbage of American politics. His sole accomplishment has been, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, to “define deviancy down” in the White House.

Ask John Kerry, John McCain and Max Cleland about his legacy.

Rove’s departure, along with that of his creature, George W. Bush, has meaning only in the question of how much of their fake piety and total disdain for political morality will persist in American life.

The answer to that won’t be long in coming. On the Democrats’ part, the jury is still out. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are still staying within the bounds of civilized contention and serious discourse.

The Republicans, who have to climb out of the Bush wreckage, seem confused. Rudy Giuliani is showing symptoms of Rove Disease, but the others are still in doubt. Much will depend of what Thompson and Romney do when push comes to bare knuckles. How far Mike Huckabee gets will be a clue.

For the moment, it would help if the MSM and blogosphere stopped arguing about the biggest bottom feeder of our time and looked ahead to putting back some semblance of decency into American politics.

Christmas in August for John Edwards

The ’08 campaign pace in Iowa is as intense as it was a month before Democrats chose John Kerry in 2004 with a new poll showing Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and—-surprise--John Edwards in a virtual tie.

Six months before the January 14th caucuses, Iowans have donated as much money, attended as many campaign events and received as many phone calls as they did in December 2003.

Edwards, who placed second last time, is making an all-out effort there to beat the two national front runners, with a week-long bus tour this month to pound home the message of his poverty campaign: “I want America to join us, all of us, to end the great work Bobby Kennedy started.”

Clinton and Obama are working hard too for a victory in the first ’08 test of strength. The former First Lady’s secret weapon is two-time Governor Tom Vilsack, a possible running mate, who is auditioning by playing surrogate in the spat over meeting with unfriendly foreign leaders.

Vilsack, in expressing “disappointment” with Obama’s attacks on Clinton, told voters, “It’s not the Iowa way.”

Meanwhile, Obama is showing considerable strength with potential caucus-goers expressing interest in his “new ideas and new direction.”

In a state with a reputation for being “contrary,” where caucus members stand in designated areas and yammer at one another and traditionally make up their minds at the last moment, anything can happen. John Edwards, for one, is hoping that it will.

John Kerry, Stand-Up

He’s at it again. The 2004 Democratic nominee who took himself out of a possible ’08 re-run with a badly told joke is back going for the funny again. The reviews suggest he shouldn’t give up his day job.

At a Democratic fundraiser last week, Kerry had a limerick about his Senate colleague who got into trouble by being on the D.C. Madam’s phone list:

“There once was a man named Vitter/Who vowed that he wasn’t a quitter/But with stories of women/And all of his sinnin’/He knows his career’s in the — oh, never mind.”

Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are safe, but John Kerry shouldn’t despair. It won’t get any laughs but he is doing good work by joining Hillary Clinton in introducing a bill
requiring the Pentagon to brief Congress on contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq.

There’s more than one way of being a stand-up guy.