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Peggy Noonan, no stranger to needless provocation, has jumped on Tina Brown's bandwagon: She agrees that Hillary "got rolled" by agreeing to be secretary of state and thinks Brown telling Hillary to take off her burqa was "witty." But Peggy thinks it is all part of Hillary's wily plan to eventually become president:
One thing Mrs. Clinton's learned is how to wait. Things turn on a dime, you wake up in the morning and there's a new headline that changes everything. Sooner or later Mr. Obama is going to get in trouble, sooner or later the trouble will take hold and settle in, and sooner or later she will be the unsullied one who quietly did her duty in spite of the slights to which she's been subjected. And when that happens, she will emerge—reluctantly, painfully—as the Democratic alternative. The one who almost won, who knew—who learned the hard way—that you can't do everything all at once, that it's the economy, stupid.
According to Peggy, Hillary is distancing herself from the drama, not because, as Sara argued this morning, she doesn't want it to seem like Tina Brown has inside information. Hillary is staying quiet only because she wants to be back in the Oval Office sooner rather than later.
I don't buy Noonan's claims. Not that I don't think Hillary is calculating, but I don't believe her current stance is exclusively selfish and manipulative. Clinton knows she took a job that requires her to be part of a team, and she is merely respecting the limits of her position.
Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images.
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In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Peter Singer, who’s said that it’s immoral to donate to the arts when children are starving, brings us another inconvenient economic truth: Any successful health care program must place a monetary value on human life.
Not every sick person should try every treatment. Most of us would agree with that proposition, especially if I cite the right example—say, a 93-year-old who might live an additional three weeks after undergoing a million-dollar treatment. But what about if that same million-dollar treatment offers six months to a 50-year-old? Or six years? We can't have national health care unless the program is equipped to make these choices, and, as Singer points out, we won't. No health care program, public or private, can function without some ability to ration financial resources. In truth, we already have rationed health care—rationed in favor of those who can afford it and away from those who can't. No emergency room in this country can turn away a patient in need of care, but those ERs don't necessarily provide the same care to all patients. Singer cites a study showing that uninsured car accident victims received 20 percent less care and had a 37 percent higher "death rate" than the insured.
President Obama has urged members of his team to avoid using the very word rationing for fear of giving opponents an easy hook on which to hang their arguments. He knows the electorate eats up stories of Britons and Canadians denied a treatment that would enable them to see their daughters’ weddings. Instead, the party line is denial. "There is no rationing of health care at all" in the proposed reform, according to Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate finance committee.
But that's ridiculous. No one believes that the proposed program will give the million-dollar, three-week-life-extension treatment to the 93-year-old. All it means is that the decisions about rationing—or, more palatably, about how health care and financial resources will be allocated under a new program—will take place behind closed doors or be so disguised in rhetoric that we can't see what's happening. And that's not what I, or Peter Singer, or anyone wants. We're capable of having this conversation. If we don't, this reform, like the last, won't happen.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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In reading the conversation about the double assisted suicide of Sir Edward and Lady Joan Downes, I'm baffled by the idea that it was either selfish or super-romantic. Old people dying quietly is nicer than old people being crushed by the pain of terminal cancer or old people having their consciousness obliterated by morphine. But romantic?
This is the most basic of quality of life issue. These are old people, one terminally ill, the other wracked with disabilities that diminished his quality of life. Why should anyone think he or she has the right to say, Well, you can't see and you can't hear and you can hardly get yourself from room to room. You're bent double with grief and loneliness but we'd like you to stick around so that when we feel like it, we can visit you at the holidays or pop by with the grandkids for a few hours once a month. Too bad, I'd say. God bless their son, who loved them enough to honor their wishes, bear his loss, and respect that his presence on Earth was not enough to make them wish to stay, much as they loved him. As baby boomers try to prolong our own lives, will we insist that our parents prolong theirs, because we're not ready to be orphans, as if being orphans was not pretty much the natural order after 40 or 50?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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A guest post from Yale law student Adam Chandler:
Senator Lindsey Graham had a flash of regret at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings on Monday: “The one thing I'm worried about is that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to deter people from speaking their mind. I don't want milquetoast judges.” Based on my experience of college and law school, it might be too late.
Yes, Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed, and the lesson of her victory is clear: Play it safe. Say nothing, and join nothing, within a pole’s length of controversy. Be like John Roberts, whose life and career path was described as a Boys’ Life “Guide to Becoming a Supreme Court Justice.” He was able to ascribe his controversial writings to others: Chief Justice Rehnquist, for whom he clerked, and the Reagan administration, in which he served. Finally, choose your thesis topics with care: The senior theses of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Ben Bernanke have been dissected by opponents and the media, as has Judge Sotomayor’s note in the Yale Law Journal.
For students who aspire to the bench or other high posts, the lesson plays out in disheartening ways. In my undergraduate constitutional law course at Duke, my professor laid out six lines of argument that could have been used to decide Roe v. Wade and polled the class to see which we found most plausible. At the time, I chuckled to see a couple of “gunners” squirm, hoping no one noticed them keeping their hands down in fear of taking a public position on The Issue. I have seen presidential-hopefuls refuse to contribute to an Internet travelogue on a sponsored trip to the Middle East. I know law students who shied away from writing on abortion, and others who were nervous about signing up for ideological student groups, uncertain what their membership might mean for them in the future. I even read a perfectly innocuous blog post about the writings of several law school classmates that ended with a disclaimer: If anyone mentioned in the post wanted to “clear it from their record,” it would be taken down. And I have not been immune: Friends told me I was crazy for wanting to write my masters thesis on affirmative action; I wrote it on undergraduate sleeplessness instead.
Such is the chilling effect of the intense personal scrutiny our nominees endure. Judge Sotomayor’s job on the Supreme Court will be to wrestle with—and take a stand on—many of the most difficult and controversial issues of the day. Wouldn’t it be nice if tomorrow’s leaders had experience doing that before they join her in Washington?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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It’s a scene you’ve watched in countless sitcoms. The dude plops on the couch to see a tape of that incredible sports game he missed, and has been talking about watching for days. And just when it’s getting to the good part, the tape cuts out, and, curses!, it seems that the pesky sister-in-law who has already overstayed her welcome taped over it with her aerobics lesson!
Well, apparently such mishaps affect multi-billion-dollar organizations, too. In a goof that seems hilariously amateur for an operation with a yearly budget of $17.6 billion—and one that is sure to make conspiracy theorists absolutely giddy—NASA has admitted that they accidentally taped over the original footage of the moon landing. Um, oops. The tapes, which NASA confessed to losing track of in 2006, were recently discovered to be “part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed—magnetically erased—and re-used to save money.”
Man, it’s tough to be NASA right now. Endeavor’s finally off, but it took a month and five failed attempts—delays that could hurt the goal of finishing the space station by 2010. And now this? It would be funny, if it weren’t taxpayer money funding such “D’oh”-inspiring slip-ups ... and if this weren't sure to lead to another 40 years of fanatical speculations about what really happened on July 20, 1969.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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It used to be that medical establishment types—people firmly opposed to markets in kidneys and most anything else—would emphasize the scope of the kidney shortage in order to shame people into signing their donor cards. More recently, as academics and policy makers have started to take the idea of monetary incentives for kidney donation very seriously, some of those same advocates have started arguing that the list isn’t that bad, the line isn’t that long—certainly not long enough to do anything drastic, like, say, offer financial compensation for time missed from work during a donation. That would, as they say, “cheapen the gift.”
Here’s something I haven’t seen before: Double X contributor Virginia Postrel—a kidney donor and a longtime supporter of financial compensation for kidney donation—downplaying the size of the shortage:
With 300 million people in the United States, the numbers shouldn’t be so daunting. Eighty thousand people wouldn’t even fill the Rose Bowl. Surely we could find enough kidney donors to end the list. But solving that problem demands creativity, daring, and, above all, a sense of urgency—a radical break with the fatalism fostered by dialysis culture. Kidney patients ought to command the kind of outrage that demanded a cure for AIDS. The list doesn’t have to exist. It is a result not of medical necessity or economic constraints but of public ignorance, conscious policy, and complacent institutions. To end the list, we first have to give up the idea that “organ donor” means someone dead.
She’s right. The vast majority of us have an extra kidney hanging around; this is an eminently solvable problem. (When kidneys fail, they typically fail together, so your spare probably won’t even serve you as backup.) But as Postrel’s terrific Atlantic piece goes on to explain, both cultural and bureaucratic constraints work against the switch from deceased to living donors. On the cultural end, healthy donors who offer their kidneys to strangers are treated as deranged eccentrics by medical ethicists and some doctors. On the bureaucratic end, even the kind of trivial compensation offered to blood donors—Movie tickets! Paid vacations!—remains verboten in the fallow world of kidney exchange. Both relegate living donation to some conceptual space outside the “normal” range of do-gooding behavior.
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Jess, Emily and Dayo, I saw Tina Brown's column on Hillary through a slightly different lens. Brown is writing The Clinton Chronicles, a book about Hillary and Bill, reportedly due out in 2010. The subject makes sense after Brown's terrific, dishy bio of Lady Di. The Clintons, after all, are our messy royalty. (The book deal was announced in January 2008, back when it must have seemed like Hillary would still be crowned our next Commander in Chief.)
Given this, Brown probably has some inside dope on what the Clintons are really thinking. She could be channeling Bill's thoughts about his wife. (Maybe The Big Dog is tired of being muzzled.) She could also be trying to raise Hillary's profile in advance of the book. Or, maybe Brown is just trying to do Hill a favor, by casting a little deserved limelight her way.
For all the column's husband-and-wife analogies, I didn't read it as a takedown of Hillary. To the contrary, much of it seemed like a thinly veiled defense of our Gal Friday. At the end, for example, Brown conjures up the image of Hillary sitting at the back of her State Department plane, feet up, no makeup on, with her "bookworm glasses," happily digging deep into a pile of briefing papers. It's a beguiling portrait of a mature, confident woman, content in her element. Brown even suggests that by keeping a low profile, Hillary may be taking a little gleeful revenge on her real husband, Bill, who likely scotched her chances to be president. But given that The Clinton Chronicles is forthcoming, Hillary surely felt she had to publicly distance herself from Brown's comments. Otherwise, Brown might seem like Hillary's Andrew Morton.
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