I'll keep this relatively short and sweet so we can all put our attention to properly celebrating the end of the Bush reign, and prepare ourselves for the inauguration festivities tomorrow. All in all, I've been very impressed by the seriousness and qualifications of the vast majority of the nominees for prominent positions in the Obama administration. But if we have to name names, here we go:
My favorite member of Obama's incoming team is Eric Shinseki, the presumptive Secretary of Veterans Affairs. After recently visiting Manzanar Historical Site (a recommended visit for any American, exposing a dark but important part of our history), the Owens Valley location of one of the largest internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, I find it even more stunning an achievement for Shinseki, born in 1942, to have risen to such heights in the United States Army.
Like Obama, his own narrative tells of the power of America at its best, and also like the President, he's been right about many of the major issues during the Bush administration, including the handling of the Iraq war. As the Chief of Staff of the Army, Shinseki repeatedly clashed with Rumsfeld and others on the Bush team over the strategy behind our involvement in Iraq, famously and rightly predicting that it would take several hundred thousand American troops to stabilize the country after the war. I think Shinseki is a great choice to lead our overstretched veterans infrastructure as we adapt to thousands of soldiers returning from American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan needing physical, psychological and social rehabilitation.
My least favorite, from a personal standpoint (I can think of others, like Ray LaHood, who are less qualified/more dubious), would have to be Tom Vilsack. Nothing too personal about the guy, but for a president known for his devotion to fitness and arugula, the idea of nominating the former governor of Iowa, the archetypal "corn state," to manage American agriculture, beseiged by a flood of cheap corn and derived products, is absurd.
With obesity and diabetes on the rise, industrial farming and monocultures threatening food safety and biodiversity, and local cultures being flattened by thousand-mile food supply chains, an Obama administration had the opportunity to fight for a new system, to treat organic and local farming as a key source of the "green jobs" the President-elect so prominently preaches.
Vilsack's strong ties to the biotech and genetically-modified food industries (and even ethanol), and his preference for large single-crop industrial agricultural holdings over smaller diversified family farms, reflect an antiquated notion that the main job of the Department of Agriculture is to produce more food calories for less money, (dating back to Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz) not to manage our national food supply in a sustainable, healthy, and diverse fashion. There may still be significant change in this arena over the Obama term, but if the past is any guide, leadership won't come from Vilsack. The good news is that this, like all of my criticism of Obama appointees, feels like nitpicking after eight years of disagreeing with the majority of the administration's important decisions.
Good riddance, George W. Bush!
-Will B. Payne
While the task of narrowing the Bush Administration's offenses against the American people to one boggles the mind, I'm going to attempt it nonetheless. Outside the major refrains against the regime that all of us on the left are practically numb to after eight years, I think that Medicare Part D, the Bush-backed effort to extend Medicare benefits to cover prescription drug purchases, was one of the biggest mistakes made in an era characterized by presidential mistakes.
I chose this particular issue partly because of the magnitude of the initiative's impact, especially in economic terms (as a part of the $10 trillion hangover chronicled by Linda Bilmes in a recent issue of Harper's) and partly because, unlike many of the other controversial issues that Bush and his team left their dirty fingerprints on, this one isn't easy to excuse through ideology.
Unlike litmus test issues like loosening environmental regulations and narrowing civil liberties, where there a variety of defensible positions taken by different political parties, the Part D debacle is a sheer case of political cronyism (two of the bill's main Republican champions in Congress left soon after its passing for sweetheart jobs lobbying for the pharmaceuticals industry), cynical machine politics, and fiscal irresponsibility, all wrapped into one package. By using an issue guaranteed to resonate with voters (a high percentage of whom, after all, are in or close to the age range eligible for Medicare benefits), then tailoring the proposed plan to maximize private profits while minimizing public utility, the bill's backers, including our 43rd president, were able to significantly increase our budget deficit and national debt (by at least $400 billion in the first ten years of the plan's passing, according to recent estimates) while enriching large companies and compromising service for the ostensible targets of the legislation.
While expanding seniors' access to life-prolonging drugs is a noble goal in theory, without taking cost into effect, in its execution, Part D was horribly and deliberately flawed, most glaringly by the stipulation that the federal government not be allowed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in bulk for drug discounts, like the far more successful and cost-effective Veterans Affairs medical coverage.
The scandal surrounding the botched implementation of Medicare Part D, has ties to the Administration's record of corrupt political appointees, and the lobbyist orgy that was K Street. I'm no health care expert, and the full story has been told better than I could by several others, notably Paul Krugman at the New York Times. His article "The K Street Prescription" lays out the lobbyist ties of the main architects of the bill, and his earlier "Health Policy Malpractice" fills in the story of the Veterans Affairs model of health care and its superior ability to provide effective health care at a lower cost.
When you read this and other explorations of the Part D fiasco, don't forget the headline-grabbing tips of the iceberg. Don't forget Iraq and Afghanistan. Don't forget Katrina. Don't forget stem cell research, or the FCC, or our image in the world. Don't forget a thousand other abuses of the office, large and small. But remember Part D, because it's often the underwater part of the iceberg that sinks us.
-- Will Payne
RSS Feed