Andrew Sullivan claims no responsibility for Betsy McCaughey's 1994 hit piece on HRC's HCR in TNR

[BurtWorm]

Sullivan has done some heroic blogging since the mid-2000s, so it may seem churlish of Kevin Drum (and me) to kick him for ancientish history. The only problem is Betsy McCaughey is still at it, and though her reputation as a responsible HCR critic is a bit tattered (thanks to John Stewart and Rep. Anthony Weiner), she's been able to make her key points against the new plan stick. Now Sullivan is trying to downplay his role in McCaughey's rise as premiere reform-slayer. (Sullivan, why didn't you send her to "the highway?"):

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/10/no-exit

No Exit— By Kevin Drum | Wed October 7, 2009 9:48 AM PST

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?

[Captain Hilts]

1. Folks like Sullivan, Dowd, Rich and Herbert should apologize for the crap they threw. nt

[gratuitous]

2. How does the editor "lose"?

I edited my high school paper, and I never lost to a writer. Ever. If a sentence needed to be re-cast or a paragraph rearranged, it happened. Every time. Maybe Andrew isn't quite all that as an editor. He should give back the award he received if he couldn't prevail over a mere scribbler who wasn't even on staff.

"I guess I could have quit." Well, Mr. Sullivan, you were picking up a paycheck for a job you were letting someone else do (whether it was the lying liar Betsy McCaughey or someone else **coughMartin Peretzcough**), so what would you have been quitting? Getting paid for nothing?

[BurtWorm]

3. Very astute post.

:toast: