Andrew Sullivan tries to answer my post from yesterday on No Exit, the article he published attacking the Clinton health plan. He says that "I don't think it's fair to expose the internal editing of a piece but there was a struggle and it's fair to say I didn't win every skirmish," which is interesting, and he says that "I was aware of the piece's flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation to debate." What he doesn't say is that he believes the piece accurately described the Clinton health care plan. Which is what's at issue. There were reasons to criticize the delivery structure the Clintons sought to implement, but No Exit simply lied about the system, claiming it would lock you in when the first page of the legislation said it was expressly barred from doing anything of the kind. The article was a smear, not a criticism. If he doesn't believe me, he should ask his colleague, James Fallows, or read the archives of The Atlantic, the magazine he now works for.
"It's odd," writes Andrew, "that Klein still supports a plan that Clinton herself has now conceded was misbegotten." Well, I don't support it politically, as it's bad politics. But it's much better policy than anything we're currently seeing in the debate (for a few words on why, see this post). I think it's odd that Andrew still supports an article that his magazine has apologized for and his new magazine discredited.
Andrew does, to be sure, make perfectly fair points on the many ways Hillary Clinton mishandled health care in 1994. He's right on much of it (though wrong on some: The Clintons did allow alternatives. The Republican voted them down, including the odd spectacle of Dole voting twice against legislation that bore his name). But here's my point: Her arrogance had nothing to do with a fundamentally misleading bit of journalism. Her paranoia regarding the press might. And when we're discussing why Clinton feels so paranoid and angry at the press, we may want to consider how such articles appeared to her.
