Archive Politics | A View from the Cheap Seats

Health care, TennCare and other flamebait

2009-08-21T16:00:00Z

You have no idea how much I did not want to write about health care. Seriously, I loathe this subject. And not just because of the enlightened correspondence I get.

Writing about a highly emotion issue like this one is not unlike putting on a pair of chum-laden swimming trunks and jumping into a pool of starving Great White sharks.

But as a native Tennessean, I am contractually bound to tell people about one previous experiment with universal health care coverage -- TennCare, the Volunteer State's 1994-2005 experiment with reform.

On its face, it was simple. Tennessee's Medicaid program was bankrupting the state. So legislators got a waiver from the Clinton administration and radically restructured the program. Medicaid patients were served by a raft of HMOs, rather than a central state program.

Savings from the HMO program were then used to expand coverage to lower-income and "uninsurable" patients. And for a while, it worked. At least on paper. More people got health insurance, and the state saved money.

But then the federal share of those costs was slowly shifted back to Nashville, and costs began to skyrocket. Political leadership lacked the will to put serious cost controls in place -- aided in no small part by a raft of lawsuits banning even the most basic limitations on the program, including verification that participants were eligible, or even alive.

Loose prescription drug rules were even immortalized in song.

There were other problems, too. Some businesses quietly began dropping health insurance and encouraging employees to sign up for TennCare.

Skyrocketing costs created a political crisis, as the Republican governor tried to push an income tax through the legislature. Suffice it to say that move didn't go over well. In the end, the state wound up with a 9.75 percent sales tax to cover the tab.

And cover the tab it did until 2005, when a Democratic governor and former health care executive finally threw his hands up in exasperation and effectively killed TennCare. The 9.75 percent sales tax remains.

Having interviewed almost all of the actors involved over the course of two administrations, I can honestly tell you that no one in the entire TennCare fiasco acted with malice. But the state learned the hard way that real, serious cost savings have to be a part of any sort of universal health care program funded by the government.

It's the Costco principle: even if the Skittles are half the cost of Wal-Mart, you're still going to spend much more money if you buy 2 tons of them instead of a single pack.

I said all that to say this: health care and health insurance are complicated topics, and the potential for unintended and tragic consequences are enormous. All involved would be well served to tread with caution.

Mailbag!

2009-08-04T17:01:42Z

It would seem some people didn't like the story I wrote about an anti-health care reform rally held in Winchester on Friday.

First, some background: Americans for Prosperity brought their "Patients First" bus tour to Winchester, and drew a sizable crowd. One of the speakers, Kate Obenshain, made her case against the health care changes advocated by President Obama and congressional Democrats.

From the e-mail, a mild taste of the displeasure:

How can your newspaper perpetuate the absolutely misleading lies spewed by Kate Obenshain as "news"? You reported a "big" crowd (merely 150 people) attended a rally, and you quoted Ms. Obenshain's totally false and inflammatory remarks as if they were important with no discussion as to their legitimacy.
...
Journalism 101 requires reporters to investigate all sides of a story, check facts especially alleged facts, and clarify the issues for the readers. You have allowed yourself to be a pawn for the right-wing fringe by incorporating their drivel as if it is "news." You wrote nothing to question or contradict her misstatements about the President's proposals leaving the readers to believe them as fact. You have failed!
...
Get your head out of your *** the sand and report the whole story. Or be creative and write a piece to expose "How Political Operatives Lie and Mislead" to get free publicity from the press!

Whew. It took me a couple of dramatic readings and some interpretive dance to really internalize the sturm und drang contained in that one.

Everybody feel better now that they got that off their chest?

All snarkiness aside, we report on what happens at rallies and similar events with just enough background to put it in context. A story about an open-air rally -- or a speaker extremely critical of the Bush administration -- is about the event, not a deep analysis issue they're talking about.

Suffice it to say that when Organizing for America's listening tour decides to make a stop in Winchester, I'll be there and we'll cover it.

That's not to say we're not going to write about the issue in depth. In fact, we already have here.

Since that story was written, I took the time to read all 1,018 pages of the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. I've also read the working drafts from both the House and Senate. I didn't spend all that time reading those tomes for no reason. There will be more published about this issue as we move forward.

Frustration on the part of health care reform advocates is easy to understand. The amazing momentum generated by the Obama campaign hasn't continued into the Obama administration, and backers are frustrated. The promise of November has run smack into the political and economic realities of January and February.

Republicans, on the other hand, were chastened by their beating at the polls. And nothing encourages a change of strategy like a historic electoral beatdown. Enter the Tea Party movement, and suddenly the GOP is on the march again, even while relegated to toothless minority status in Congress.

The fight over health care reform will play out according to its own rules, in its own time, over the summer. And as it happens, we'll cover the events, dig deep into the issue and give our readers a comprehensive look at the whole picture.

In the meantime, everybody just take a breath. You'll feel better.

Big pictures, little thoughts

2009-07-27T22:19:15Z

Yeah, it's been quiet here in the Cheap Seats. I acknowledge that. But rather than give you some sort of "I've been busy" excuse, I'll just admit something that causes me a great deal of discomfort.

I don't know what to think.

Yeah, yeah, cue rimshot and snarky laughter from people who know me. But I mean that sincerely. This election has truly proven to be a different beast than anything I've covered before, or even seen, in a decade of dealing with matters political.

At the top level, the race between Democrat Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell has been more energized than anything I've ever seen. It's true that most people don't pay attention to politics until the World Series is over, but both candidates have been out swinging for the fences early and often.

McDonnell has gone on the offensive on issues like education and transportation, while Deeds has already called in the heavy hitters for his campaign -- President Obama and Vice President Biden have either promised or already made stops on his behalf.

In the mid-ticket range, Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Democratic nominee Jody Wagner have both made stops near Cheap Seats HQ, both taking extremely heavy shots at each other for July. Bolling's complaints about Wagner's role in bad state revenue estimates and Wagner's shots at Bolling's plan for creating jobs would be more at home in October than July.

At the bottom of the ticket, the fight between Democrat Steve Shannon and Republican Ken Cuccinelli is the single most energized attorney general fight I've ever seen. After weeks of beating each other over the head about Supreme Court decisions and debates, Shannon released a Web ad today trying to tie Cuccinelli to some eyebrow-raising remarks by Republican 99th House of Delegates district candidate Catherine Crabill:

If I had to be pinned down, I'd say the overriding theme of this campaign so far is desperation.

Republicans desperate to prove their string of losses is an anomaly, Democrats desperate to prove they can win without President Bush to run against and President Obama to run with. Republicans desperately want to prove that the Democratic wave wasn't real support, but just Bush fatigue. Democrats are desperate to prove that their massive win in 2008 wasn't just a populist flash in the pan.

Voters have a sense of desperation all their own, at least from what I pick up on at Wal-Mart and Costco on a weekly basis. Unemployment seems to lurk around every corner, and every other neighbor is moving out due to foreclosure. People I talk to sit on the front porch and drink cheap beer, wondering when the next economic shoe is going to drop.

Maybe I'm wrong (and expect to hear from my readers if I am), but it looks to me like everyone involved in this thing is desperate in one way or another.

Thankfully though, if I know anything about human nature, making decisions based on desperation always leads to a great outcome. Right?

Of politics, polling and pollsters

2009-07-09T18:44:32Z

It's easy to tell when campaign season gets rolling here in Virginia. Signs clutter the highways, political e-mails back up like leaves in the storm drain and more polls than you can shake a stick at.

I've heard it said that newspapers shouldn't report polls, since they're only a snapshot of public opinion and there's always a chance they could be biased or just plain wrong. There's some merit in that position.

The Associated Press is very choosy about the polls it reports on, at least according to this story. There's merit to that position. If you only report on the polls that your organization has complete control over, the chance of some outside bias making it into the polls are much less.

That being said, polling is expensive. An editor and I talked to a polling company once about commissioning a survey for one of our congressional districts. I wasn't privy to the phone call to the pollster, but I was told that it included the phrase "How much?!"

Here in the cheap seats, we've always been inclined to watch as many polls as possible Statistically speaking, the more data points are involved, the more accurate the results.

So to a large extent, we watch publicly available polls to help get a read on which way the wind is blowing in the Shenandoah Valley and the rest of Virginia. Generally speaking, there are four pollsters that I watch with some regularity:

• Rasmussen Reports: These guys are polling machines, churning out data on a daily basis. They're also good at building long-term trends for races in Virginia. Scott Rasmussen is very transparent about methodology and questions.

• Public Policy Polling: They might be employed by Democrats more often than not, but everything I've seen about this outfit gives me confidence. They're transparent with methodology, and throw the cross-tabs out for the world to see. Tom Jensen also blogs the results and cuts through the clutter well.

• SurveyUSA: I've been watching this polling company since I started this gig in 2005. I started paying close attention to them when they made me look like an idiot by predicting a sizable win by Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine over Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. And we all know that can't happen. Right?

• Mason Dixon: The only reason you don't see Brad Coker's numbers in our paper more often is because of Mason Dixon's unfortunate habit of releasing results for publication on Sunday, the only day we don't publish. Mason-Dixon is transparent with all their information, and they have the best geographic handle on Virginia of any pollster I follow.

Bottom line, they're all transparent in their methods and results, they have a pretty good track record for accuracy and none of their head honchos are afraid to get on the phone with a small-town paper and answer questions about their work.

Occasionally, though, we will grab a poll from someone who polls Virginia less often: like Suffolk University in Massachusetts, or Christopher Newport University here in Virginia.

Taking a lower-frequency poll has bitten us before, like this Majority Watch survey in 2006 that showed the 10th Congressional District to be a 5 point race. In reality, Rep. Frank Wolf won re-election by 16 points.

Is the poll from a campaign, pitching only one or two data points, not their entire results? No thanks. If we can't see the entire poll, then it's probably just spin from a campaign looking to improve their image.

Bottom line, if the poll isn't transparent, it's probably not going to be mentioned in our pages. At least until the funding for the Cheap Seats Institute for Public Opinion and Awesome Stuff Research comes through...

Quick Hits

2009-07-02T17:51:51Z

The Cheap Seats have been vacant recently, as we've spent a huge amount of time working on a series with the rest of the news department about the impact of the recession on the Northern Shenandoah Valley.

Now that we've cleared the decks of that effort, we can turn out attention to some of the political matters piling up on the desk.

• Where's Gov. Kaine?

Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has been playing coy with his schedule lately. Not his gubernatorial schedule, but the political schedule he keeps for the Democratic National Committee as its chairman.

Both Republicans and members of the press corps have been beating on Kaine pretty hard for not being more forthcoming with the details of his travel. Kaine has said he's not going to release the schedule, but would answer if asked.

So last week, we asked. Kaine's office politely told us that the governor was in New York, but in the future to direct questions to either the Democratic National Committee or Kaine's Moving Virginia Forward political action committee.

Why the ruckus? It's all about November. Republicans see a huge opportunity here.

Kaine has never had the god-like approval numbers of former governor-turned-U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner. Putting a dent in Kaine's image by casting him as a part-time governor who raised money for national Democrats while Virginia's economy burned would make Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath County, road to election in November that much harder.

• McDonnell Debates

Speaking of November, Bob McDonnell's team has challenged Deeds to no fewer than 10 debates between now and November. That's a huge number compared to recent statewide campaigns.

Why the challenge? It would seem that Team McDonnell has read "The Art of War" -- and remembers Jerry the Duck.

In 2005, Democrats mocked Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore mercilessly for refusing to meet the Lt. Gov. Kaine's debate schedule, branding him as the aforementioned mallard.

McDonnell's team has enough Kilgore veterans on board to neutralize the issue as soon as possible -- by proposing an unrealistic schedule of debates to which the Deeds' campaign would be flatly nuts to assent. Kaine had a significant rhetorical advantage over Kaine, but Deeds and McDonnell are much more evenly matched.

Being first in the field gives McDonnell control of the issue, and the duck stays unemployed for the 2009 election cycle.

Telegraphing punches and the conventional wisdom

2009-06-12T17:58:08Z

Lots of ink has been spilled in recent days over just what the "conventional wisdom" about campaign 2009 is going to be. Just how will the re-match between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds play out?

Over at Tertium Quids, Norm Leahy thinks the conventional wisdom has yet to solidify. He's right. But when you spend as much time sitting up here in the Cheap Seats as we do, you learn to read the stitches on the fastball as it's coming toward you.

Not that it takes a great deal of work to see how these two campaigns are going to unfold. Both have poker faces like a 10 year old boy hopped up on nitrous oxide and methamphetamine.

So here, in broad strokes, is how this campaign will play out.

The working wisdom among the chattering class will be that Deeds is now as he was in 2005 -- a back-country conservative Democrat, and it's an idea that the campaign will push forward hard.

It's a strategy with a lot of merit. Deeds came within a whisker of beating McDonnell in 2005. It also plays well into that Mark Warner strategy of working the "urban crescent" -- win big in Northern Virginia, and don't get massacred anywhere else.

But if I know my campaign staffers, McDonnell communications guru Tucker Martin has an army of GOP Google monkeys pouring over the legislative records of the past four years, looking at every single vote Deeds cast, watching video of every moment he was on the floor talking about controversial issues.

Because Deeds had to put some tarnish on those backwoods credentials to get enough Northern Virginia street cred to become viable in Northern Virginia, aka the Washington Post endorsement. Recall Senate Bill 6009 and Sen. Henry Marsh's gun show "loophole" bill.

I'd look for lots of talk about walk-back on the marriage amendment, too.

Meanwhile, Democrats have telegraphed their line of attack against McDonnell (and many other Republicans) for months. They plan to use the remaining afterglow of President Obama's campaign and cast McDonnell as someone who opposes his agenda, most notably, the stimulus money aimed at unemployment.

They're also planning to use whatever lingering dislike remains for President Bush and aim it toward McDonnell. If economic conditions begin to improve between now and November, look for lots of stuff like "continuing the failed economic policies of George W. Bush," etc.

See what the Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Party of Virginia have already done. McDonnell doesn't want to help the unemployed, McDonnell opposes the stimulus, ergo McDonnell wanted to cut education, etc.

If the Democrats need a little extra fire for the base, they'll attack McDonnell as being too close to Pat Robertson and fundamentalist Christians, raising the "theocracy" line of attack.

At the bottom line, both camps are looking to define their opponents in terms of Obama, and in terms of Virginia: Deeds wants to be seen as a solid denizen of RoVa who is acceptable to NoVa, who backs Obama, while McDonnell wants to be seen as a RoVa resident who can keep NoVa out of everyone's wallet, and will oppose bailouts and other unpopular Obama faire.

Democratic Primary '09: A post-mortem

2009-06-10T18:46:20Z

Here in the cold light of dawn (or mid afternoon) following the Democratic triumph of Creigh Deeds, I've been reading what some outlanders think of our little scrum. AP moved an analysis of the race, as has the New York Times and The Atlantic.

What's striking about all three is just how wrong they are.

Deeds didn't win due to "Macker fatigue," the triumph of moderate ideology or by keeping his nose clean in a mud-slinging slug fest. He won because he was the only candidate with Northern Virginia credentials who didn't get attacked.

Yes, I know Deeds is from Bath County, a place that makes where I grew up look like Atlantic City. But bear with me.

People who don't live here have a hard time recognizing it, but there is a very real tension between different areas of the state -- particularly between Northern Virginia and less urbanized sections, charmingly called the "Rest of Virginia" by some observers.

Politicians decry those who "pit one region against another," but the dirty little secret is they don't have to. Ill will between NoVa and RoVa is long-established and often times palpable, particularly in Richmond.

RoVa people tend to think of NoVa as a bunch of rich, uppity so-and-sos who like to look down their noses at the rest of the state, with its coal mines and guns, at least until the need money to pay for something like Metro or more roads.

NoVa people can't understand why the rest of the state won't go along with what they want. After all, NoVa is the economic engine, and it sends way more tax dollars down to Richmond than it gets back. And if they want to do something about roads, then the rest of the state should chip in to keep the economic engine running in good order.

This divide is at the heart of Tuesday's result.

At it's most basic level, this was a contest for the hearts and minds of Northern Virginia. See the Virginia Public Access project's fantastic map of ballots cast here. Northern Virginians are quite simply the 800-pound gorilla of Democratic politics in Virginia.

Essentially, we had two Northern Virginia candidates and Deeds. Terry McAuliffe, a long-time resident and consummate inside-the-beltway guy, and Brian Moran, Alexandria's voice in the House of Delegates.

Enter The Washington Post, and their endorsement process.

Operatives from more than one campaign told me that, during interviews, the Post's editorial board zeroed in on one issue and one issue alone -- transportation. And given that this is the Post's edit board, they focused on the same part of the issue that they've hammered on for as long as I've been covering Virginia politics, the gas tax.

At the end of the day, Moran said he wouldn't raise the gas tax, McAuliffe said he wouldn't raise any taxes until the economy improved. Enter Deeds, who said he would. The endorsement speaks for itself:

In 18 years in the General Assembly, Mr. Deeds has time and again supported measures that might be unpopular with his rural constituency but that are the right thing to do, for Northern Virginia and the state as a whole.
...
Last year, however, as both candidates [Deeds and Moran] were laying the groundwork for their campaigns, Mr. Deeds courageously voted for a proposal that included raising the state's gas tax, unchanged since 1986; Mr. Moran helped kill the bill by opposing it in committee.

Done deal. Deeds had NoVa street cred. And the results were immediate.

Look at the major inflection point in this Pollster.com tracking graph, right after May 21, the day the Post gave its blessing to the man from beyond Interstate 81.

Given the assurance that they could walk away from the two NoVa candidates for a third option, the war between Moran and McAuliffe started to do more than just swap support between the two -- it drove voters to Deeds.

Because of the urban-rural split, the balance of Virginia was already a fairly solid lock for Deeds.

A two-man race could have been a very different story. Take McAuliffe and Moran together, and Deeds loses by about a half of a percentage point, or roughly 1,200 votes.

That's not to take anything away from Deeds' campaign. It takes some significant foresight -- and intestinal fortitude -- to lay off staffers to buy air time in Northern Virginia at the last minute.

There is some merit to other explanations of why Deeds waltzed to victory on Tuesday, but the biggest is the simplest: he was the only candidate with NoVa bona fides that wasn't subjected to withering attacks.

Deeds, Wagner post convincing wins

2009-06-10T00:01:07Z

Turn out the lights, it's time to go home.

State Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath County, and former Secretary of Finance Jody Wagner have wrapped up the Democratic party's nomination for the top two spots on the ticket in November.

See our day-long coverage of the balloting and aftermath here.

Live Blog: Democratic Primary 2009

2009-06-08T21:29:27Z

&lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;altcast_code=29512c52fd" &gt;Democratic Primary 2009&lt;/a&gt;

Enter RoboToddler?

2009-05-28T17:57:09Z

I've heard a lot of robo-calls in my career covering politics. Some of them were bad. Some of them were very bad.

Hideously bad.

The kind of bad that makes you want to hang up the phone, but you just can't, because you simply can't tear yourself away from the human train wreck happening on the other end of the phone. (You know who you are, I don't have to name names. *cough* Gov. Huckabee *cough*.)

But the call I heard today was quite possibly the most... well, it really defies description. Listen to the latter half of the call via Bearing Drift.

Given, we here the Cheap Seats have very little room to talk about sending young children to do questionable tasks. (Still, it's not like I made 'em hold the bottle rockets while we were lighting them with the propane torch. But I digress...)

Team Brownlee was, as one could expect, beside themselves.

The child these individuals used to make the phone calls sounded to be under 5 years old. What kind of person uses a toddler to conduct a political smear?

To involve a small child in such a dirty political trick is appalling. To make such scurrilous charges is unethical. To conduct these calls without including a disclaimer is unlawful.

Brownlee's campaign says the calls went to delegates to this weekend's GOP convention, which means one of the two other candidates or someone with the state party is either behind the attack or gave info to a third party.

The man behind the anti-Brownlee Web site referenced by the pre-schooler in the robo-call, Brian Gentry, says he had nothing to do with the calls. Find a well researched defense of Brownlee here, via Hoodathunk.

Gentry spoke with Roanoke Valley Republican:

I didn't do the phone calls or know anything about them. I did get it in my voicemail, as I am also a convention delegate and will be there on Friday and Saturday.

My website clearly states my name, and has my contact information available. If I were going to do calls, I would have not made my website private, as ANON suggested, I would have put my name on the phone call.

With all the calls, voicemails and threatening emails I've been getting, it would probably have been better if I did register my domain privately.

The convention is this weekend.