The Beltway's alternate reality

There's got to be a better way

Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.

These are going to be shorter as I recuperate, though I’ll also have some upcoming guest posts.

Props to my buddy Corey for making fun of Ron DeSantis to his face today.

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I’m still peeling myself off the ground more than two weeks after heart surgery, which followed six months of struggling to breathe and parse increasingly arcane notes swapped between doctors with the bedside manners of actuaries and mechanics. As a New Yorker with a career in media, I’ve never felt slower nor so deliberate in my entire life.

Now, it’s still early in the post-operative period, and there are plenty of follow-up appointments to attend, but the doctors told me that the operation’s success means that it could last me the rest of what should be a normal lifespan. So what do you do with a new lease on life when you’re forced to look at things from a new perspective, physically and emotionally?

Even as I’m looking up at the world, seeing the action play out in slow-motion, a few things are clear. First, unrelated to politics or this newsletter, I plan on going forward with a documentary about the audacious scandal working class football club that I helped to save and the broader post-industrial global economic order. I’ve never been more confident in or excited about a project, so if you have any interest in learning more, please let me know.

As for government, politics, and this newsletter, well, of course I’ll keep on fighting. But there has to be a better way, not only for myself, but for all of us.

Politics have long since descended into self-parody — Jon Stewart is back for a second era at the Daily Show — but I don’t know that anybody that works in the Beltway on a day-to-day basis truly understands this, at least not in a way that is at all useful. Willy Wonka knew he was a colorful gadfly, but he was still deeply committed to his demented contest and candy-creation process.

Power wins most often by scrambling our senses, and there are a lot of useful idiots working for the most powerful right now.

Take the media reporter for the digital outlet Puck News. I don’t know the reporter and don’t want to make it personal, because maybe they’re a great person, so I’ll leave their name out of it. What I can’t ignore is a column premised on the laughable notion that up until recently, the media hadn’t spoken about President Joe Biden’s age enough.

The piece is filled with quotes from anonymous reporters who either suffer frequent concussions or get their memories wiped every few weeks:

Since the beginning of Biden’s term, many White House journalists have reported on, or alluded to, concerns surrounding Biden’s age in often gentle or euphemistic ways. Nevertheless, several of the journalists I spoke with said the true significance and importance of that issue, as they observed it, was not reflected in the coverage—often due to the sense that it was sensitive or unseemly, or because there was no obvious evidence that it had affected his performance as president beyond optics

Tell me how euphemistic or tactful these headlines are:

If there’s been one consistent talking point throughout Biden’s entire presidency, it’s been his age. And that’s entirely fair, by the way — I said last year that I thought that Democrats shouldn’t have shunned primary challengers, a la 2016, and that Biden should have mulled stepping aside.

The column does mention that reporters whisper about a Biden who seems to have aged a lot over the past few months in particular, and if that’s truly the case, they should undoubtedly feel comfortable discussing it in a reported context. I just can’t abide an alternate Beltway universe where Biden’s age hasn’t been an issue and must therefore be thoroughly examined. If you ever notice this newsletter veering even slightly toward that insider idiocy, please let me know, ASAP.

A few news stories for you — more to come for paid subscribers tomorrow.

Health Care

The story of the year thus far has been the huge success of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. More than 346,000 low-income residents have gained health insurance through the program since it began taking new registrants last December. That’s good for more than 1000 new enrollees per day.

Many of them were automatically enrolled by the state thanks to pre-existing data, which is exactly how government services should work.

That strategy, he said, allowed the department to hit the ground running. Most of the new beneficiaries gained Medicaid with little or no action needed on their end.

“Those individuals didn’t have to go into an office,” Ludlam said. “They didn’t have to call a DSS worker. They didn’t have to fill out a form. Effectively, they woke up on December 1st with a card in hand, and they were able to access the full Medicaid benefit on Day One.”

North Carolina has also been a leader in using this data to minimize the unwinding (which it paused for children for a year).

Democracy in Action

In Ohio, perennial loser attorney general Dave Yost rejected the ballot summary submitted by voting rights activists, the second time he’s rejected clear language because he doesn’t like what it says. The activists have appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Here in New York, the bipartisan redistricting committee on Thursday produced a new Congressional map that wouldn’t do much to change the current map’s partisan borders. The Democratic supermajority in the state legislature will soon vote on whether to approve the map or seek one with more advantageous lines in the NYC suburbs. This could help determine control of Congress.

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