The television advertising you’re seeing in the U.S. Senate race amounts to cynical efforts by wealthy and distantly unaccountable groups to play you for chumps.
These “super-PACS” and “nonprofits” crouch low in Washington behind mountains of unregulated dollars. From there they launch missiles into your television screens-missiles of imprecise accusation, embellishment and exploitation.
You can blow a lot of smoke for very little money, relatively speaking, through our inexpensive media markets serving sparse populations.
Yet we get as many senators as California. So we’re an economical exploitation-in this case a full hundredth of the Senate for a scant few tens of millions-and perhaps we’re considered a little unsophisticated, too.
Imprecision, embellishment and exploitation come from both sides.
-
———
For these purposes, let’s dispense as quickly as possible with the egregious effrontery of the Koch brothers, distant string-pullers for Tom Cotton.
The Kochs have set up a supposed veterans group, Concerned Veterans of America, that actually exists to provide political cover for economic libertarians to cut defense spending, even to advance notions of converting veterans’ pensions to 401(k)- like instruments.
Then this Koch facade runs ads in Arkansas applauding their agent Cotton for supposedly championing those very pensions.
In fact, though, it is U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, the Democratic incumbent against whom Cotton runs, who ushered through the Senate a bill to preserve cost-of-living increases in those pensions.
Then the Kochs find Wanda to say she’s had her health insurance canceled, although no one in Arkansas has yet had any health insurance actually forcibly canceled by Obamacare-and may not until after 2016, if then. The state insurance commissioner, acting on federal permission, has delayed Obamacare-forced cancellations.
Imprecise. Embellished. Exploited.
Both sides? Why, yes, of course.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a Democratic PAC of his own. This PAC exists on the presumed obligation-partisan if not quite moral-to counter the Kochs in kind.
It has a new commercial on our local TV stations saying Cotton took money from “insurance companies” when he was a management consultant.
It charges that now he wants to give those companies a ton of new profit by cutting old folks’ Medicare and sending senior citizens into the private insurance market.
It is true-and ought to be bad enough-that Cotton, while preposterously assailing Pryor for Medicare Advantage cuts, has supported proposals from U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan that effectively would turn Medicare into a voucher system.
Seniors would get finite amounts of premium assistance to go into the private insurance market and buy coverage at costs surely to exceed the voucher amounts. It would destroy Medicare.
But there’s no evidence for the implication that Cotton wants to do thatin order to reward “insurance companies” that once hired him, indeed for any reason other than that he is a right-wing extremist who doesn’t believe much in government.
“Insurance companies?”
Apparently the Democratic hit squad took that fatally imprecise phrase from a line-a single word, actually-in Cotton’s biography.
As a young management consultant for McKinsey and Co., Cotton is said to have worked through McKinsey in a variety of industries listed in highly generalized sequence, including “insurance.”
Cotton’s campaign took great pleasure in responding that the “insurance” experience was singular and as follows: He got assigned to work as an underling on a McKinsey team advising, not private insurance, but the Federal Housing Administration, a government mortgage agency that has an insuring component.
You should understand what McKinsey and Co. does: It hires bright kids out of elite colleges and makes them management consultants who get called in by executives who probably know what they need to do but need some outside hot shots to pretend to tell them so.
Chelsea Clinton, out of Stanford, worked a while for McKinsey. So did Bill Halter, out of Oxford.
To help with the Beebe administration’s payment-reform initiative for Medicaid, by which medical care gets reimbursed generally for episodes rather than specifically for each service, the state Human Services Department retained McKinsey.
Of course if you really wanted to smear anyone who had ever worked for McKinsey, you could always bring up the firm’s most disastrous association.
That would be with Enron.
Notably, that biographical writeup that has Cotton working through McKinsey in “insurance” also has him working in “health care.”
Cotton’s campaign tells me the “health care” work is subject to nondisclosure rules about particulars, but that it had to do with consulting an unidentified client on growth opportunities for over-the-counter products such as multivitamins and calcium supplements.
I can’t find much there for imprecision, embellishment and exploitation, but I suspect the Democratic PACs can.
-
———◊-
———
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 04/01/2014