roadkillrefugee's posterous

David Sirota is leading a charge to relitigate his opposition to health care reform.  To wage this campaign, he's exploiting the departure of an obscure staffer from the Senate Finance Committee to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as PROOF AT LAST of conspiratorial corruption by the Obama administration, Congress and private health insurers in crafting health care reform.  

The person he's attacking is Liz Fowler. Since 2008, she has been Chief Health Counsel for the Senate Finance Committee and Senior Counsel to its chairman, Senator Max Baucus.  BREAKING:  HCR passed!  Not a lot of health care legislation in the pipeline at the office right now for old Liz.  Probably a good time to look for something else to do, if you were her. 

In fact, if she were so inclined, it would be the IDEAL TIME to cash in by going to K Street and become a lobbyist.  With her expertise, she could easily negotiate a base salary north of $500K, before bonus.  Or she could join a DC law firm with health care clients and get a similarly hefty package.  Or she could join an HMO, a hospital or health care-related trade association for a similar package.  She is enormously valuable to a marketplace that needs to understand a large and complex law and its implementing regulations.  She will never have as much leverage as she has right now.

But apparently she's not so inclined.

Liz chose to stay in government by joining HHS in a deputy director position.  It's probably in the lower-to-mid tier of the Senior Executive Service, so I'd guess she's making around $150K.  Good money, but less than one third of what she could have easily landed in the private sector.  In fact, it's less than the $160K base salary of first-year associates at most good DC law firms, before bonus.  And by the way, by joining the executive branch, she is now subject to restrictions on lobbying that more severely limit her exit options than when she was a Senate staffer.  Way to cash in, Liz.  How bloody corrupt of you.

Her great crime is she previously spent two years at Wellpoint, the largest private health insurer, as VP of Public Policy from 2006-2008.  I've found no evidence that she served as a registered federal lobbyist while there.  What evil deeds did she do while at Wellpoint?  I've been unable to find anything. Sirota hasn't either, apparently.  Maybe that's because George Bush was president at the time, so it was a little awkward for Wellpoint to undermine the Bush administration's health care reform efforts because, well, you know, THERE WEREN'T ANY.

As far as I have been able to tell, she has spent most of her career in public service.  She spent her early years in at Hogan & Hartson, worked for Senator Pat Moynihan, Rep. Pete Stark and Senator Max Baucus, and then later rejoined Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee in 2008.  Her numerous degrees (B.A. from Penn, Ph.D. in public health from Hopkins, and law degree from Minnesota) presumably triggered a significant amount of student loan debt.  So she had the motive and opportunity to cash in, and probably nobody would have said boo if she had left the Senate to go to K Street.  But because she chose to stay in public service, that's evidence of corruption?

Sorry, but there's a reason that it is well settled law that your fiduciary obligations to your prior employer terminate with your employment.  The law doesn't favor restraints on trade.  You have absolutely no duty of loyalty whatsoever to your prior employer (other than perhaps to maintain trade secrets, but that's a separate technical issue).  To suggest that she has some lingering, perpetual obligation to Wellpoint (which at this point is two jobs ago) is pure fantasy in the absence of concrete evidence.

And Sirota also thinks the story is an indictment of the Washington media for its failure to make her job move a national scandal. That's right, our media is corrupt because it fails to draw wild conclusions based on speculation!  I'd agree that there are many forms of Washington media corruption: pay-for-access salons, reporters captured by those they cover, allowing cowardly blind quotes from government officials without good reason, participation in leak manipulation, and SEO-driven sensationalist headlines, but not its failure to breathlessly cover a Senate staffer's move to the bowels of the vast federal bureaucracy.

More troubling, most people these days work for more than one employer over the course of their career.  Perhaps the trend was pushed by Curt Flood ushering in the era of free agency in sports, but employers and employees alike don't expect a lifetime commitment anymore.  So the notion that our professional identity is permanently tied to a former employer is absurd and entirely unfair.  Should someone who was a middle manager in HR at Arthur Andersen or Enron be forever tarnished by that job?  No. Should a well known liberal civil libertarian blogger who used to be an associate at a notorious Wall Street corporate law firm be forever defined by that job?  Yes. I mean NO!

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Update: 7/19/10

Since my post, Sam Stein has done solid reporting to debunk this story.  First, Stein reports that Fowler was never a lobbyist for Wellpoint.  In addition, several advocates of health care reform who know and worked with Liz Fowler sing her praises, including staffers of SEIU, Public Campaign Action Fund, and Hill Democrats. Perhaps most persuasive, however, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) strongly sings Fowler's praises.  Stark has been an advocate for single payer health care for decades.  If we're going to attribute the views of Fowler's past employers to her (which I wouldn't recommend), we can't cherry-pick -- you'd have to argue that she must be to the left of the Obama administration as a zealous advocate of a fully government-administered single payer health care system, like her former boss Stark.

The anger over Liz Fowler is really about blaming her for the actions of Senator Max Baucus and the Senate Finance Committee he chaired, and for which she worked.  I certainly agree that Baucus' "Gang of Six" working group of three Senate Democrats and three Senate Republicans was not only a waste of time, the delay was very harmful to both the legislation and the administration's early momentum.  Ultimately, the bill voted out of that committee was substantially re-worked in any event -- first by Senator Harry Reid combining several important elements of the bill voted out of the late Senator Kennedy's HELP committee, and then later by the House amendments that passed separately (and thereby avoiding conference at a time the Democrats lacked 60 votes).  Had Baucus moved more rapidly, perhaps the final bill could have been enacted before Senator Kennedy passed away, which not only would have been a fitting tribute for his life's work he could have enjoyed, but might also have led to a more progressive bill. And if HCR had passed sooner, perhaps the tea party movement would have remained on the silly fringe, and the administration would not have had its broader agenda hijacked by frumpy, balding members of Congress bickering over process.  So believe me, I get the frustration with Baucus.  But blaming his counsel is wrong.  The creation of the Gang of Six and its absurd duration were decisions above her pay grade.

Another thing that drove this faux outrage was the Bill Moyer's video that Sirota included in his original post.  Moyer's outrage wasn't just that Fowler left Baucus' staff to join Wellpoint, but that when she rejoined the Senate Finance Committee, another staffer left and joined Wellpoint.  Moyer's view was that this chain of events had to be evidence of something sleazy by Wellpoint, and the complicity of the broader system.  But ironically, it was Fowler who broke the chain by NOT cashing in on her Senate experience when it was time for her to leave.  Moyer's video pre-dated Fowler's decision to leave the Senate for the executive branch.

One last thing, it occurred to me that I really didn't fully explain this post's headline.  The facts of Liz Fowler and her new job aren't really the point of this faux outrage -- I could debunk it all day and it wouldn't make a difference to those who were so willing to accept its premise blindly.  It is really about the relitigation of health care reform by opponents from the "left" like David Sirota.  Actually, I don't think he deserves the label "left" (he famously once compared Obama voters to the KKK on Twitter, before apologizing and deleting his tweet only after the highly regarded scholar of the Jim Crow era, Professor Blair Kelley, pointed out to him via Twitter what an egregiously ahistorical analogy that was -- it was a comparison I find difficult to spring naturally from the heart and mind of someone truly of the left), but he spends most of his time on left-leaning blogs, I'll stick with it by default.  Sirota and his allies have been using the same tactics of GOP campaigns against Obama generally, and against the health care reform initiative in particular, from the beginning.  The patented Lee Atwater/Karl Rove technique is to toss out a charge that has a kernel of truth but is grossly exaggerated to push a harmful, politically motivated attack.  It attracts attention because the charge conjures up feelings of anger, fear or betrayal.  The kernel of truth gives the media license to give the story oxygen.  By the time it is debunked, often days later, the damage is done, because the media has already moved on to the next thing.  The falsehoods live on as tenaciously as weeds in an urban vacant lot.  From the right, the cries were were designed to work with their base: Death panels! Federal abortion coverage! Rationing!  From Sirota and Jane Hamsher, the cries fed a contrived narrative that Obama was betraying his campaign promises and selling out his base. Rahm is killing the public option! Obama really doesn't want HCR to pass!  Yes, it is true that Fowler once worked at Wellpoint, and was an important Senate staffer in drafting the legislation -- there's your kernel. It's spun to suggest that she has never stopped doing the bidding of Wellpoint and was hired with this proclivity in mind by an Obama administration hell bent on selling out true reform. Behold - a hit job!