“I Thought They Said Obamacare Was Evil”

Affirmation for the Affordable Care Act from an Unexpected Source

Republicans, predictably, have failed abysmally in their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and the usual media hand-wringing can be expected to go on for at least a few more days. The New York Times covers both the public and private sides of the inevitable blame game, Reuters focuses on the Great Dealmaker’s inability to close his first big deal as president, and the Guardian actually finds a possible bright side for the president at the other end of all this. But the media report I found most interesting was this Anderson Cooper interview with Ohio Governor and former presidential candidate John Kasich, which appeared a few days before the failure of the repeal effort.


Fast-forward to 3:50 in the video to hear Kasich say this:

“If Republicans jam this through…we will be right back where we were…before we started with Obamacare.”

Now, Kasich certainly engages, throughout this interview, in the wild intellectual gymnastics all Republicans engage in when criticizing the ACA. But in the end, here is a prominent Republican leader, a governor of a swing state, saying out loud that in the days before Obamacare, the country was worse off. That is, Obamacare has actually made things better for Americans.

This is just one Republican, perhaps unwittingly, making this statement out loud on national television, but the reality is, the entire American Health Care Act debacle perpetrated by the president, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and all of their fellow Republicans, whether it be the governors, the Freedom Caucus, or the Tuesday Group, has, more than anything else, served to solidly affirm the importance of the Obamacare law and the sweat, toil, and political mastery that were required to get it enacted in the first place. Here are three reasons why:

1. Obamacare is a compromise. Despite the false narrative long pushed by Republicans that Obamacare was a shady deal negotiated in secret in back rooms, it was in fact a huge compromise. As moderate conservative thinker David Frum explains in a recent piece in the Atlantic, Obamacare constituted the “adoption of  ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s and then enacted into state law in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney.” Recall that President Obama and Democrats didn’t have to do this. They had the votes to pass a single-payer system of the kind Bernie Sanders still advocates, which would have been truer to liberal principles and in the end, I believe, much less expensive. But they knew there would be a huge political backlash, and that Republicans would be able to repeal and replace a single-payer law, probably with something that looked a lot like Obamacare, so they compromised.
   
   
2. Obamacare is a success. An analysis by Margot Sanger-Katz in a February piece in the New York Times clearly details the fact that, despite mixed results overall for the ACA, it has had some remarkable successes that would have been unthinkable before Barack Obama became president. Millions of Americans now have health care coverage and are now more financially secure, health insurance overall is now more comprehensive, and both income inequality and the federal budget deficit have been reduced. And one must always remember that these successes occurred despite a constant drumbeat of invective, hyperbole, and irrational resistance to the law by Republicans nationwide. Tweaks are certainly needed to address weaknesses, but total repeal is no longer even important to most Americans, and that’s because the law has delivered on its most important promises.
    
3. Obamacare has reframed the debate. As Sanger-Katz points out, “The Affordable Care Act has shifted the nation’s baseline expectations for how health care should work. Its successes have pushed Republican politicians, like Mr. Trump, into making expansive promises to provide insurance to all Americans.” And it’s not just government accountability that is discussed differently now; it’s health insurance and health provider services as well. As Sanger-Katz writes, “[Obamacare’s] failures have become focal points, too, leading to calls for lower insurance deductibles and for more choices in doctors and hospitals.” 

All of this indirectly led the president and Congressional Republicans to do something very strange over the past few weeks: after seven years of pledging to cheering crowds that they would totally repeal Obamacare immediately after taking power, they instead entered into a debate about how to modify the law: which provisions to keep and which to cast away, and what timing would be most advantageous politically. This tacit admission seems to have gone unnoticed, but that’s just what it was: a tacit admission that Obamacare had improved the lives of so many Americans, many of them Republicans, that it simply could not be repealed without massive political ramifications.

It’s hard to imagine in this weird aftermath of a bizarre, three-week Republican fire drill that the Obamacare law was debated in Congress for the better part of a year, that Republicans proposed dozens of amendments, many of which were accepted, and that many Democrats voted for the law despite serious misgivings. Even Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the more conservative Republicans in the Senate, has now admitted that the Democrats followed a more deliberative process in 2009 than the Republicans have with the AHCA. That’s called compromise, and it’s the necessary evil at the core of democratic governance.

As history judges this turbulent period in American politics, it could well be that Obamacare, whatever Republicans do in the coming months to try and push it over the cliff, just might go down as the last great legislative achievement of this democracy for a very long time.

Craft and Inspiration – Third Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 3

In the first two installments of notes from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, which I attended the weekend of January 14th and 15th, and which carried the theme Inspiration, we shared inspirational and practical advice from the likes of U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, author Benjamin Percy, and a team of top literary agents.



This time, let’s rise above again with some thoughts on the appearance of poet/activist Ishmael Reed.

Ishmael Reed

As a six-foot-four-inch middle-aged white dude sitting dead center in the PW Live auditorium, I’m pretty sure I caught Ishmael Reed’s eye when he took the Art Institute stage with his daughter Tennessee. He seemed to be looking straight at me, and his eyes seemed to be saying, “What’s this old white dude doing here?” I’m probably making that up—a flight of self-importance, perhaps—but if he had been looking at me, and if he had been thinking that, I certainly wouldn’t blame him. In our current divisive political climate, with levels of racism and misogyny bubbling up out of their cauldrons—cauldrons being stirred, for the most part, by old white dudes like me—I can only imagine what must be going through the mind of a man like Reed, whose long career as a novelist, poet, playwright, lyricist, essayist, and educator has been devoted to studying, illuminating, and exposing issues of racial and cultural discrimination and injustice. Thoughts like I told you so, I’ve been trying to tell you, and Haven’t you all been listening to me? come to mind, but I’m sure that’s just my own pedestrian speculation, wholly unworthy of a mind as expansive as Reed’s.

On the Art Institute stage that Sunday, Reed started with a lengthy poem excoriating Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, a poem that dispensed with traditional poetic devices like rhythm and rhyme and simply started every verse by repeating the Speaker’s name, then issuing one scathing rebuke after another. I found it interesting that Reed would choose Ryan rather than Bannon or Pence or even Trump himself as his object of poetic ire, but on reflection it’s clear the younger man, the one so many people have been led to believe is the level-headed and reasonable one, is by that misconception the most dangerous of them all.

Freed to speak his mind after the readings were over, Reed discussed the purpose and inspiration for one of his long-standing pursuits, the Before Columbus Foundation. Described as “a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature,” the foundation resists the dominance of Anglo perspectives in American literature since long before the nation’s founding. But Reed dispensed with the word contemporary in that description and urged all of us to explore the literature that existed hundreds of years before Anglos came to destroy and displace the indescribably rich cultures and storytelling traditions that had existed for millennia in what is now North America.

Reed reminded us that, in fact, the first Anglos who came to New England were fundamentalist Christians, closed-minded people not unlike today's Trump voters, people who were not curious onlookers, but committed extremists bent on destruction and ethnic cleansing. The carnage wrought by these early invaders was the beginning of a great hijacking of the literature that had existed on the continent for centuries, the work of Spanish writers and Native American writers that over the 300 years has either been shoehorned into the dominant Anglo tradition or completely set aside and ignored. Reed explained that the Before Columbus Foundation and the impressive cast of authors that make up its Board of Directors are essentially issuing a plea to thoughtful readers everywhere to reach out and expose themselves to the broad range of North American literature that existed centuries before the Anglos arrived, and the foundation’s work, including the American Book Awards, is to provide resources for all of us to do just that. As the foundation’s website explains, “Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not ‘discover’ America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do so.”

And if you’ve made it this far, kudos! As if it weren’t obvious, I’d encourage any writer to watch Poets & Writers magazine and pw.org for announcements about the next PW Live conference, and If you’re able to, by all means, attend. All of the sessions were captured on video, and I assume they’ll be posted somewhere eventually, so I promise to post an update to this blog when they are. Many of these will be well worth watching.

Douglas Engelbart, America, and Great Things

The loss of a computing icon gives us the opportunity to reconsider America.

On July 3^rd, Silicon Valley lost one of its greatest icons. If you are reading this at a computer, as the vast majority of you are (ubiquitous mobile devices notwithstanding), you are at this moment using many of the technologies conceived by Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). It probably doesn’t surprise you that some techno-geniuses long ago invented things we now take for granted like the hyperlink that brought you to this blog or the mouse you used to click that link. But what might surprise you is that all of these concepts—along with more basic ideas like organizing digital information into folders and files, viewing graphic representations of information on a screen, and even interacting with friends and colleagues through computers—were all created many years before companies like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM ever took advantage of them. And what might surprise you even more is that the objectives set out by Engelbart and his team back in the 1950s actually never mentioned a computer at all, and were in fact solely focused on humans and the effectiveness of their intellectual work.

I personally was a 9-year-old Catholic school boy (and those of you who know me know that must have been a very, very long time ago) when Engelbart and his team, and most notably his primary research partner Bill English, delivered what is now known as “the Mother of All Demos” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 8, 1968. If you’re geeky enough, as I was, to make it well into the YouTube posting of this video, you just might learn some valuable historical lessons about our country, what we once were, and what we’ve become.

The video shows what was projected on a large screen before a 2000-seat arena, and Engelbart introduces it by saying, “If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display that was backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?” Forty-five years ago, he literally describes the work environment of hundreds of millions of people on the planet today.

Engelbart sits below and to the right of the screen, which shows both his face and a number of other images superimposed on the view of his “computer-display work station.” Behind the scenes, Bill English commands a team of six people located both in San Francisco and at SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park, who make the demonstration real and capture it on film by manning “cameras, switches, mixers, special-effects controllers, etc.” In noir black and white, Engelbart starts his presentation by showing capabilities and “user features” of one of the first timeshare computer systems. The computer feeds back, robotlike, with beeps and buzzing at various pitches. About 5 minutes into the demo, the video shows Engelbart’s hands and keyboard, and you realize he is using a mouse. Even the microphone headset Engelbart wears looks as if it belongs in 2013 and not 1968.

Ultimately, however, like all good presenters, Engelbart starts to give us stories. The first is the story of his wife calling and asking him to do some shopping, giving him the chance to show us how he constructed not just one but a series of shopping lists for various stores he would visit on his way home, and not just the lists, but also a map of his trip home showing the various stops, each with a hyperlink to the shopping list associated with that particular stop.

Then, 18 minutes into the demo, Engelbart declares that he will be “shifting from the illustrative material to the real working stuff, in case you wouldn’t recognize it.” And this is where he gets to the more interesting story: that of his team at SRI, its history, its objectives, and its funding sources.

His team had had the system he was demonstrating up and running for about 6 months, going from one timeshare terminal to 6, with plans to add another 6 in the coming months after that, and here he explains that “... the next step when you’re faced with having this in your office all day, as I now do (it’s been very exciting since), how do you put that to work for yourself?”

At the time, the AHIRC was staffed by 17 people working in a specialized computer lab. Staffing over the years from 1950 onwards had grown in fits and starts, and had in fact been only 1 from 1950 to about 1962, rising to 17 by 1968. Through that time, it functioned as what Engelbart calls a “goal-oriented pursuit” of the following primary objective:

Improve the effectiveness with which individuals and organizations work at intellectual tasks.

Notable to me in that objective was its broad sweep. Engelbart wasn’t trying to win a war, he wasn’t trying to defeat terrorists, and he certainly wasn’t trying to make any money for anyone. Nonetheless, in all that time, he tells us, AHIRC was “sponsored by government agencies. Currently, ARPA, NASA, and RADC. Also, in the past, AFOSR and ESD. These are the people that first grubstaked us many years ago.”

Now many of you will recognize those acronyms but many won’t, so I’ll help: Engelbart and his team were supported in their sweeping research objectives by the U.S. Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, and the U.S. Air Force’s Rome Air Development Center. In addition, they had gotten initial funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. And of course that’s a good thing, because it’s highly unlikely that the iconic computing enterprises of the day, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, or any of the rest, would have spent a dime on a small research team whose objectives had no direct line to their bottom line.

Even more remarkable, Engelbart goes on to explain his team’s research approach, which he describes as an empirical approach of build and try, or “bootstrapping in a new sense.”

We needed a research subject group to give them these tools, put them to work with them, study them, and improve them. We’ll do that by making ourselves be the subject group and studying ourselves and making the tools so that they improve our ability to develop and study these kinds of systems and produce in the end this kind of system discipline.

Now as I heard Engelbart saying this on the video, I was listening from my 2013 frame of reference, and from that frame of reference I found myself channeling the likes of a Paul Ryan or an Eric Cantor, and hearing what they would hear, and what I came up with was something like, “These guys want our government to give them money so they can build a bunch of high-tech toys that they themselves will go play with, all in the guise of a serious research project!?” Well, that’s exactly what they wanted, in a sense, and that’s exactly what they got, and that’s exactly what they did, and in the end, hundreds of millions of citizens of the world got new, more effective, more efficient ways of executing their daily work. And of course there were “toys” at AHIRC and there was “play,” but what there was, mostly, was intense, groundbreaking, intellectual work, the cost of which had been justified and explained in exacting detail in research proposals submitted to government agencies dating back to 1950. And we can all be thankful that there were intelligent people at those agencies applying both critical and creative thinking to the reviews of those proposals, because otherwise we never would have gotten the very tangible results that we are now, by the thousands, looking back on in the Mother of All Demos.

In Engelbart’s day, the roles of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor were played by people like Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon, and I struggle, frankly, to imagine any of those elected leaders applying the kind of critical and creative thinking the Defense Department, the Air Force, and NASA did when they approved Douglas Engelbart’s research proposals. I will, however, continue with that struggle, because that’s my only way of remaining connected and hopeful in our hyper-partisan 2013 America.

I was surprised to find in his writings that Engelbart was aware, at some level, of what he was asking of the world as he embarked on his quest for a better world. Seeing ever-increasing complexity in daily life, and increasingly complex problems facing humanity, Engelbart realized that his effort to tame that complexity would amount to something like a “crusade.” And as he wrote in his 1986 paper Workstation History and the Augmented KnowledgeWorkshop:

Crusades have many strikes against them at the outset. E.g.: they don't connect to a normal source of government or business revenue; they don't have nice organizational frameworks—you can't go out on the streets and expect to find financial, production, or marketing vice presidents; even if you accomplished the sweeping change that was the ultimate objective, chances are that in this very complex world, the side effects might be bad enough to make you wish you hadn't.

We can only be glad and appreciative that despite those misgivings Engelbart resolved to press on, and despite the forces arrayed against him, our government decided to support him in the end.

Barney Frank has said, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” We should all be pleased and encouraged that so often those things turn out to be the truly great things that change the world.