→ Health Care, Media
No Exit
| Wed Oct. 7, 2009 8:48 AM PDT
Betsy McCaughey's mendacious article "No Exit," which ran in the New Republic in 1994, has long been given a share of the credit for killing the Clinton healthcare plan. Andrew Sullivan, who was TNR's editor at the time, says he's addressed all this before, he's sorry he published the piece, he ran plenty of rebuttals, and anyway Clinton's bill had plenty of other problems too. Fine. But he also tells us today that he tried to correct some of McCaughey's worst excesses but failed:
One key paragraph — critical to framing the piece so it was not a declaration of fact but an assertion of what might happen if worst came to worst — became a battlefield with her for days; and all I can say is, I lost. I guess I could have quit. Maybe I should have. I decided I would run the piece but follow it with as much dissent and criticism as possible. I did discover that she was completely resistant to rational give-and-take. It was her way or the highway.
He lost? He was the magazine's editor. So who forced him to run the piece? Andrew says he doesn't think it's professional to "air the specifics of internal battles after the fact," but you can hardly go this far without doing exactly that. He's basically implying pretty strongly that he didn't want to run the piece but had to anyway, and had to run it precisely to McCaughey's specifications. That's pretty extraordinary. Having said that much, surely he owes us the rest of the story?
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Comments
Martin Peretz is the most likely suspect
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 9:38 AM PDT.
Martin Peretz was the owner and editor in chief at the time. He still is the owner of the magazine and still writes editorials. He hired Sullivan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Peretz
I call BS on this. Sullivan
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 9:40 AM PDT.
I call BS on this. Sullivan chose to become part of the Clinton hit squad, and running this piece was part and parcel of that. In the 90's it was the height of fashionable cynicism to suggest that the Republican leadership were grownups and that Clinton was a dirty big government hippie who, like all Democrats and filthy liberals, didn't represent either real Americans or responsible government.
Now that we've seen the Republicans are exactly the reckless crooks that those dirty liberals warned us they were, Sullivan is claiming he really saw through them all along, but he was somehow forced to run with this.
Sorry, but no respectable journalist would accept a vague protestation of "they made me do it" without a public accounting of who "they" were, why they made him do it, and what exactly they made him do.
His role
Submitted by RZ (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 9:41 AM PDT.
He was the editor, not the publisher. The publisher decides what to print. I have a publishing background, and while it is unusual for the publisher to overrule the editor, it is not unheard of.
I'd say it's time to let up on Andrew. He made a mistake and has admitted it. Lacking a time machine, I'm not sure what else he can do.
To repent for this
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 9:55 AM PDT.
To repent for this healthcare fuckup, I'd like to see him donate a kidney. Better, I'd like to see him donate two kidneys.
Uhhh...
Submitted by spork_incident (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 10:30 AM PDT.
Sully's HIV+ so I don't think this is the best idea.
---
At any rate, Andy's been so dishonest for so long why should anyone believe a thing he says?
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Donate it to Betsy. 2
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 2:25 PM PDT.
Donate it to Betsy. 2 kidneys, 0 stones.
Amen, RZ
Submitted by Strether (not verified) on Thu Oct. 8, 2009 1:06 PM PDT.
This must be where I can read the comments of people who've never made a mistake; I need to come here more often.
On the other hand ...
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 10:16 AM PDT.
... why believe anything Sully says?
Accountability
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 10:53 AM PDT.
And the magazine that ran the best piece debunking "No Exit" then hired Sullivan to work for them.
And people wonder why this country is failing.
Publisher vs. Editor
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 11:54 AM PDT.
Sullivan was plucked out of relative obscurity in his mid-20s to be TNR's Editor. And that was likely a strategic decision by Peretz, to have a relatively inexperienced editor who was willing to do the publisher's bidding and not fight back much. And Sully made mistakes due to his lack of experience and the ego massaging he was getting.
I give Sullivan credit for honestly talking about his role in the episode and by all appearances learning from it. He can still be an elitist prick from time to time, but he is also one of the more honest bloggers out there when it comes to acknowledging his biases.
Funny, I was wondering the
Submitted by jonas on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 12:17 PM PDT.
Funny, I was wondering the exact same thing as Kevin and actually emailed Andrew this morning with a note that raised Kevin's questions nearly verbatim. How on earth could an executive editor be railroaded into publishing something he didn't want to? Andrew wrote back a brief reply that he -- as he said on the blog -- wasn't going to reveal details of the internal debate over the article and left it at that. But the first commenter who suggested that Sullivan's views were overridden by Peretz probably has it. Sullivan hasn't said as much, but I think that's what he's trying to convey to his readership without singling out Peretz, whom he still considers a friend and mentor. How else to explain his statement in his blog post that "I could have resigned," if he wasn't under pressure from above? That pressure could have only come from one place.
Sullivan waffles, as usual
Submitted by nick.t. (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 12:19 PM PDT.
The only thing that Sullivan has ever been consistent about is picking and following the winning side. He published a good deal of misogynist and racist nonsense when the GOP were winning, kissed Bush's ass and was a major cheerleader for Iraq, and now that Obama is in power he is suddenly discovering that he's really a centrist Democrat. Why would anyone take a timeserver like Sullivan seriously?
Except back in 2007 he was defiant
Submitted by Cranky Observer (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 12:23 PM PDT.
> I give Sullivan credit for honestly talking about his role in the episode and by
> all appearances learning from it. He can still be an elitist prick from time to
>time, but he is also one of the more honest bloggers out there when it comes
> to acknowledging his biases.
Except that as recently as 2007 Sullivan was quite defiant about the "No Exit" piece:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/andrew-sullivan-takes-responsibili...
Cranky
Peretz
Submitted by Arion (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 2:18 PM PDT.
Peretz is an odd bird. Connected to some of the most awful and devious practices in high finance, he runs TNR as a kind of Fox news for those with a BA. He ought to be ewxiled to the Standard
I am less civil....
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 2:30 PM PDT.
KDrum wrote: Having said that much, surely he owes us the rest of the story?
I prefer: Having said that much, surely he should just confess that he is a douchebag.
I eschew the superfluous question mark....
The 5th Columnists made him
Submitted by Pinko Punko (not verified) on Wed Oct. 7, 2009 9:01 PM PDT.
The 5th Columnists made him do it! Good to know he could run with The Bell Curve but not spike this sh*t. Well done, Andrew.
Go Back To England
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Oct. 8, 2009 4:31 AM PDT.
Sullivan's done enough damage and has more than worn out his welcome. This week he had the gall to say that Obama needs to "STFU". Could you imagine an American going to London and saying that about the Queen?
It's time for Sullivan to take his British ass back to England where he belongs.
If the Peretz forced
Submitted by Sully is loathsome (not verified) on Thu Oct. 8, 2009 6:32 AM PDT.
If the Peretz forced Sullivan to publish No Exit why did he spend the better part of 15 years talking about how proud he was to have done so? Why did Sullivan happily accept an award for publishing it?
Before No Exit was shown to be a complete fabrication Sullivan would claim credit for helping to defeat HillaryCare. Once it became apparent that No Exit was a big lie, Sullivan still stated TNR was right in publishing a "provocative" piece.
Sullivan only distanced himself from McCaughey after she was exposed as a complete fabricator in her latest attempt to kill healthcare reform.
Maybe somebody should ask
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Oct. 8, 2009 6:13 PM PDT.
Maybe somebody should ask McCaughey for her memory of those fights that Sullivan is talking about.
One thing that deserves to
Submitted by kmellis on Thu Oct. 8, 2009 11:33 PM PDT.
One thing that deserves to be mentioned is that "No Exit" certainly doesn't characterize TNR's stance on the Clinton health care reform effort. I subscribed to TNR at the time and was a very close follower of the health care debate and, as I recall, TNR's over-all editorial position was favoring a single-payer system.
Nevertheless, Sullivan's tenure at TNR was the beginning of its long rightward trend. I strongly agreed with, and supported what was then Sullivan's frequent outspoken advocacy for gay marriage; but, other than that, a lot of his views were to my right and to the right of where TNR had been under Kinsley. And then after Sullivan came Kelly—and it was Kelly's insane Clinton-hatred and overall strong rightward push at TNR that caused me to cancel my subscription.
Behind all of this is Peretz. I don't doubt that Peretz had Mcaughey's back, assuming there was an editorial disagreement between her and Sullivan. On some social issues, Peretz is nominally a liberal; but he has the character and temperament of a conservative. He might as well be a full-blown rightwing nutcase—it's pretty safe to assume he's ultimately responsible for whatever noxiousness that comes from TNR.
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