Last May I lifted the title and the hook from one of Paul Simon’s songs to write “Is the Triple Aim ‘Slip Slidin’ Away?” The recurrent passage or chorus in the song is:
Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away…
Those words alone would make it a great song, but the last verse really grabs me:
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man
We’re working our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away
I was stunned the first time I heard those lines more than forty years ago in 1977. No pop song that I had ever heard before painted such an accurate picture of what I was beginning to feel. These days the phrase and the deeper meaning are hard for me to shake.
As the midterm elections approach I am having a Yogi Berra “deja vu all over again” moment to which Slip Slidin’ Away is the soundtrack. Back in early October 2016 I was concerned about the potential outcome of the election. Check it out by going back to the October 4, 2016 posting and reading forward to the election, or take my word for it. At the time I was reading the website “538” on an almost daily basis for the reassurance they were offering me that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, would be the 45th president. I was disturbed, not by what I read but by what I was seeing and hearing, and by what I was not seeing and hearing.
A friend and I had taken a trip up to Coos County in northern New Hampshire and the source of the Connecticut River to do some trout fishing on the “trophy runs” between the “Connecticut Lakes.” I was impressed that as we drove North the only campaign signs I saw were for Donald Trump. That is not exactly true. I think the Trump signs outnumbered the Clinton signs about 500 to 1. It was a different world but not unlike the South or much of “flyover” America. I became even more worried later in the month when I realized that the “outrage” over the “Access Hollywood tapes” was limited to Hillary supporters and that the only one who would be held accountable would be Billy Bush. In conversations with people I began to realize that the enthusiasm for Secretary Clinton was not as deep as I had originally thought. Then came the stunning reality of election night. At the time I did not fully understand it, but I was not surprised to learn after the election that many minority voters stayed home, many women voted for Trump despite his “locker room bragging,” and unionized labor and blue collar men who had long been Democratic voters were drawn to the “I can do it” bragging of Trump perhaps because of, and not despite of, all of his deviation from the norms of civility.
I wish that I could say that I am optimistic about the upcoming election because the country is disgusted with the president’s desecration of the office, but that opinion is not as widely shared as I wish it were, and is not a reliable indicator of the outcome of the election. It seems that many voters can find Trump personally disgusting and simultaneously feel real good about what he is doing in office to advance their long frustrated concerns. Ask any evangelical to square Trump’s behavior with their own sense of Christ’s advice on how to live as expressed in the “Sermon on the Mount.” Because of what he gives them many are wiling to overlook his personal failures. Many of them agree with Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who said that Mr. Trump’s victory was evidence that “God’s hand was at work.” It is remarkable to me that the reports recently aired at the UN by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, confirming that we are less than two decades away from disaster has not elicited any effective response form the president. Journalists like Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker are reporting on the incredulous lack of response to the IPCC’s report.
Last week, the United Nations’ scientific advisory board delivered its assessment of those numbers. The findings of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally—and justifiably—described as “dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’ worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have run through the so-called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.
It seems that we are slip slidin’ away, but the president is more focused on lamenting on the pain suffered by Brett Kavanaugh and his family than dealing with the fact that climate related famine is a decade away. The economic and human disasters that awaits us before today’s kindergartners graduate from college boggles the mind and will dwarf in significance our negative balance of trade with China or the downsides of illegal aliens crossing our borders. Issues that require thought that then get translated into votes for legislators seem harder for voters to process. Cancelling treaties, throwing caution to the wind in international negotiations with despots, and suggesting that he will define gender in a way that undermines decades of progress in moving toward an individual’s right to define their own identity are hard to process through the multiple elections for seats in Congress that must be won to change the composition of the Senate and House in order to reign in a president who seems unable to think beyond knee jerk responses of self adoration.
Back in October 2016 I tried to make a case that the issue of the future of healthcare in America was not getting enough airplay in the presidential debates or on the “stump.” Before the 2016 election the outcome of a Trump win that I feared most was the death of the ACA. That concern about the loss of access to care for millions of Americans was not enough to balance the fear generated by the candidate about the further loss of manufacturing jobs, ISIS running wild in the Middle East, or the waves of murder, rape, and other heinous crimes that would be the outcome of unconstrained immigration.
Thanks to the miracle of John McCain’s downturned thumb in 2017, the ACA is still the law of the land, but it has been greatly damaged by multiple administrative maneuvers and the cancellation of the mandate by the tax “reform” law. Like a slowly creeping but lethal infection the next stages of destruction or dismantling of the ACA will be the attack on the exemption from concern about preexisting conditions and the security of freedom from sham policies that provide inadequate coverage and benefits. We can read that healthcare is the number one issue in the midterm elections according to polls and the opinions of political analysts. But wait, healthcare is not the only issue. The Huffington Post identifies at least twelve important issues. Progressives could win Congress by focusing on healthcare, the courts, gun control, immigration atrocities, and threatened abortion rights. Trump’s supporters could also retain control of Congress by successfully touting the tax bill, two conservative Supreme Court Justices, a high stock market, low unemployment, an initial bump in the economy from the tax bill, a tough stance on immigration, some of the president’s apparent foreign policy victories in dealing with North Korea and Iran, and the continuing satisfaction with the president’s attack on “political correctness.”
There are other issues that add to the uncertainty of the moment. Will Republican’s be “energized” by Brett Kavanaugh’s partisan attack on Democrats during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings? Will the president’s numerous bombastic political rallies energize his base or demoralize those who would have voted for opposition candidates? Will efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in states like Georgia result in Republican victories?
There is much less uncertainty this time around about what will happen to healthcare if Republicans retain control of Congress. David Leonhardt of the New York Times paints an ugly, if unlikely, picture of what will happen if we repeat the election day surprise of 2016.
If Republicans do manage to keep both chambers of Congress, it would cause a political shock. So far, much of the speculation has focused on what a Democratic House takeover might mean — attempts to rein in Trump’s executive actions, subpoenas, investigations, maybe even impeachment. But it’s important to understand that a Republican victory would also change Washington.
It would be validation for Trump, who could then brag that he had defied the experts once again. It would mean he had outperformed Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman, all of whom suffered drubbings in the first midterm election of their presidency. It would embolden Trump to push even harder toward the America he wants — where corporate oversight is scant, climate change is ignored, voting rights are abridged, health care is a privilege, judicial independence is a fiction and the truth is whatever he says it is.
Newsweek reports that Mitch McConnell is pretty clear about what he will try to do if the Republicans hold onto the House and Senate.
Less than 24 hours after indicating that he would like to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Reuters that if Republicans win the Senate this November, they will once again take up their fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
In an interview Wednesday, McConnell said that the Republican failure to repeal the law in 2017 was a “disappointment.” If Republicans had the votes to “completely start over, we’d do it,” he said. “But that depends on what happens in a couple weeks…. We’re not satisfied with the way Obamacare is working.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to repeal Obamacare and has recently indicated at midterm rallies that he’d like it to happen as quickly as possible. The president has signed a number of executive orders designed to weaken and bring instability to the program, including abolishing the act’s individual mandate.
Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. I do hope that the enthusiasm that many of us were feeling for a positive outcome for the midterm elections is not “Slip Slidin’ Away.” I hope that in our desire to improve health we are not vulnerable as the song suggests:
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man
We’re working our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away
The best way to avoid watching our hopes slide away on another disappointing election night and have those hopes replaced by the misery that will be compounded for all, but especially for the underserved and marginalized in our society, is to vote and ask others to vote. I wish that there was a more certain solution. It is my opinion that until those who share a concern about the direction the country is headed can come together with a more united alternative strategy about a more equitable future, we will remain at risk for more of what has happened over the past two years. What worries me as much as the reality of what has happened is the yet unharvested poison fruit that has been planted and fertilized by an undermining of norms over the past two years. We desperately need a victory to fortify our hopes for a chance to get back to the effort to achieve the Triple Aim.
