I don't really want to keep battling back-and-forth about No Exit with Sullivan, whose current writing I rather like and who I just saw walking outside Open City, but so long as Andrew wants to keep coming back to it (with little jabs at me), it's illuminating to examine what he does and doesn't quote from Mickey Kaus's post on Elizabeth McCaughey (Attacks on me: Yes. Rebuttals of Sullivan: No). Fun for the whole family! Meanwhile, Kaus thought the article was a pack of lies when it was published (as did James Fallows, and Theodore Marmor, and later on, The New Republic editorial team), so I wouldn't exactly be turning to him for back-up.
The piece was dishonest. That was, at least originally, McCaughey's fault, much more so than Andrew's. Andrew's not a healthcare wonk, and he certainly didn't read the whole legislation. It's his ceaseless defense of the piece -- in which he doesn't defend the article's accuracy, but instead attacks Clinton for being arrogant, or praises himself for being "provocative" -- which rankles. As one of the National Magazine Award judges who voted to honor McCaughey and later felt deceived wrote, "Clinton’s plan says what it says. Any article on that plan must be based on accurate statements about what the plan says." If Andrew would like to say, clearly, in contradiction to a host of health policy experts, his own writers, his old magazine, his new magazine, James Fallows, Jon Cohn, Uwe Reinhardt, Rnald Dworkin, Paul Starr, Len Nichols, the Clinton White House, and many others, that McCaughey accurately represented the 1994 Clinton Health Reform Plan, let him say so. As it is, Andrew's offering the atmospherics of a defense without actually defending the piece. He doesn't want to be judged wrong, but knows he can't actually claim that he was right.
