No Exit

Few were surprised when Pataki dropped McCaughey from his reelection ticket in April 1997. By year's end, she had become a Democrat (grandly invoking Winston Churchill--"I'd rather change parties than change my principles"--to explain the shift) and launched her own bid for governor. The maneuver discombobulated both parties. Some Democratic leaders saw McCaughey as a grasping, unqualified opportunist. But, by that time, she was the wife of Wall Street big dog Wilbur Ross. (In December 1995, the bride and groom, an even more prosperous Yalie than Betsy's first husband--Ross has been a member of Forbes's billionaires club since 2005--held their reception aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid, surrounded by their 600 nearest and dearest.) A staunch Democrat, Ross had pledged not only to fund his beloved's gubernatorial run, but also to open his wallet to supportive down-ticket candidates.

This, understandably, did not sit well with McCaughey's primary competitors. Nor did McCaughey's challenge ease tensions with Pataki, her boss/rival. (Even as she ran against him, she declined to resign the lieutenant governorship.) Two months after switching teams, she grew suspicious that Pataki was bugging her phones. She brought in a counter-surveillance expert to do a sweep of both her office and home, and, when he didn't find anything, refused to pay his $3,000 fee, the contractor alleged. (Like so many of McCaughey's troubles, this one made its way into the tabs.) Compounding her troubles, the candidate was tearing through campaign staff like tissues (continuing the trend she'd set as lieutenant governor). She had a reputation as a controlling, demanding, abusive micromanager, and every week seemed to bring news of another staffer heading out the door. (One woman lasted only a day.) With each departure came a string of unflattering quotes about McCaughey's instability, indecisiveness, and narcissism. "A lot of politicians are out for the limelight, but Betsy's constant need twenty-four hours a day was something I'd never seen," departed aide Kayla Bergeron marveled to the Daily News. Speechwriter Sam Thernstrom charged that McCaughey tried to force him to stay by involving his mother, writer Abigail Thernstrom, who was an old friend of the candidate's: "She said if my mother didn't make me stay, she'd make certain I never worked again."

For a while--a long while actually--McCaughey won plaudits from many New Yorkers as a hard-charging, independent woman whose troubles stemmed largely from her refusal to be pushed around by a sexist political establishment. Part of this flowed from the periodic cretinism of male colleagues--like the time D'Amato suggested his new protégé secure Mayor Giuliani's endorsement for the 1996 ticket by making him "an offer he couldn't refuse," or the time Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver wiggled his hips mockingly while snarking that he didn't possess McCaughey's powers of persuasion. But the lieutenant governor fueled this battle-of-the-sexes storyline when it suited her. A couple of years into the job, when State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno publicly groused about her "overly aggressive" lobbying, McCaughey countered: "When a man makes a stance in defense of the public, he's called a man of principle. When a woman does, she's criticized as being overly aggressive." Later, as her feud with Pataki heated up, the lieutenant governor publicly complained that she was under attack for not being part of the old boys' network. And when, two weeks shy of the 1998 Democratic primary, McCaughey announced that her husband Wilbur was cutting off her campaign funding--a move presaging the couple's post-election divorce--she kicked the woman-against-the-odds shtick into high gear. Failing to secure her new party's nomination, she nonetheless stayed in the general election on the Liberal Party line. Sure, she was facing a rough road, she told The Washington Post at the time, but, she noted, "Women, especially, are saying to me, ‘You go, girl!'" Come November, McCaughey pulled less than 2 percent of the vote.

However badly McCaughey may have been treated by the men in her life, the defiant, go-girl shtick was an odd choice for a woman whose candidacy had been almost single-handedly bankrolled by her husband. But McCaughey is not one to get hung up on such ironies. Nor did she apparently put much stock in the old adage of live by the husband's wallet, die by the husband's wallet. Rather than put the unpleasantness behind her, two years after the election, McCaughey filed a $40 million fraud suit against her by-then ex-husband, claiming that he had reneged on his promise to fund her campaign unconditionally. In the meantime, she returned to the world of conservative think tanks, this time looking to political pal and president of the Hudson Institute Herbert London for a fellowship at his shop, where she remained until just a few months ago. (The dissolution of her post was unrelated to her recent notoriety, London assures me.) Retaining an interest in the health care system, McCaughey began crusading to reduce the number of hospital-contracted infections, and, in 2004, founded RID, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths--a worthy, if not especially high-profile, pursuit. As for the abuse heaped upon her during her political years, McCaughey harrumphed to the New York Post about how easy it was for women such as herself to be dismissed as "ditzy" or "the dumb blonde." "That will change," she predicted, "as more women enter into politics." No evolution (or even revolution) in gender politics or regular politics, however, is likely to dispel the aura of melodrama that seems embedded in McCaughey's genetic code. As Vanity Fair scribe Michael Wolff, a knife-edged observer of all things Upper East Side, puts it, in a quote that sounds eerily like a description of Sarah Palin, "There was always this sense of chaos that surrounded her."

As McCaughey finds herself in the middle of yet another maelstrom, friends and supporters express dismay at people's eagerness to say such terrible things about her. They stress her sincerity, her intellectual integrity, and her commitment to the facts. "Betsy does her homework" is an oft-repeated theme. "I have trouble buying into the premise that she is making errors and wrong and false statements because she's so meticulous, and she'll give you a source on everything," says Elizabeth Whelan, head of the American Council on Science and Health, an industry-friendly (and -funded) group on whose board McCaughey sits. Certainly, McCaughey has cultivated an image as facts-focused truth-teller, usually by way of contrast with the slipperiness of political types. Recounting her fateful first reading of the Clinton bill, McCaughey told TNR in late 1994, "I was shocked. ... For the historian, the ultimate value is being faithful to the truth. And the plan was very different from what I'd been led to believe." During the heat of her gubernatorial race, McCaughey, asked about her ideological leanings, told The New York Times that she thought of herself "more than anything, as an honest, call-them-as-I-see-them person." And she invariably presents her warnings about Obamacare as part of her commitment to exposing the truth, no matter how unpopular. As Borer sees it, that's what makes McCaughey such a lightning rod. "It's the emperor's new clothes," she explains. "That's what Betsy's all about: Looking at the emperor walking down the street and being the one saying, ‘He doesn't have any clothes on.'"

By contrast, McCaughey's many detractors would argue that the problem is her dogged insistence that the emperor has no clothes when everyone else can see that he's wearing flat-front khakis and a navy-blue golf shirt. While not everything she says is off the mark, says Gail Wilensky, one of McCaughey's conservative critics, "It's very frustrating to see somebody who makes outrageous statements that bear no relationship to reality receive so much attention." Yes, McCaughey professes to have read the legislation currently circulating, and, as in 1994, she brandishes that fact like a talisman that can dispel any conflicting viewpoint. But, also as in 1994, she spins out an indefensibly sinister, apocalyptic translation of the text that no amount of countervailing evidence can shake. Thus, health care adviser Emanuel's theoretical writings about how to allocate scarce resources, such as human organs, morph into McCaughey's conviction that Obama's "deadly doctor" advocates denying treatment to the elderly and infirm on cost-benefit grounds. Likewise, a database to coordinate information on which treatments work best for which patients--an initiative supported by wonks across the political spectrum--is seen by McCaughey as the first step toward government-programmed computers ordering doctors how to do their jobs. Within the self-styled empiricist resides the mind of a pathological alarmist.

Asked why her analysis bears no resemblance to that of other experts regardless of ideology, McCaughey consistently responds, "My reading of the bills is correct." Even when it is pointed out that her interpretation is clearly hyperbolic--e.g., her fantastic assertion on Fred Thompson's radio show that "Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that, every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner"--she will not budge. Ironically, her familiarity with the data, combined with her unrecognizable interpretation of it, makes it nearly impossible to combat McCaughey's claims in a traditional debate. Her standard m.o. (as "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart recently experienced) is to greet each bit of contradictory evidence by insisting that her questioner is poorly informed and should take a closer look at paragraph X or footnote Z. When those sections don't support her interpretation, she continues to throw out page numbers and footnotes until the mountain of data is so high as to obscure the fact that none of the numbers add up to what she has claimed. "It's impossible to keep up with the quantity of misinformation," laments Henry Aaron. "It's like being sprayed with muddy water."

Since her earliest days in the spotlight, McCaughey has presented herself as a just-the-facts-please, above-the-fray political outsider. In reality, she has proved devastatingly adept at manipulating charts and stats to suit her ideological (and personal) ambitions. It is this proud piety concerning her own straight-shooting integrity combined with her willingness to peddle outrageous fictions--and her complete inability to recognize, much less be shamed by, this behavior--that makes McCaughey so infuriating. In this way, perhaps most of all, she resembles the tell-it-like-it-is good ol' girl Palin, whose scorching self-regard and ostentatious disdain for politics-as-usual infuse even her most self-serving fabulisms. Palin, of course, hawks homespun wisdom, faith, and common sense, in contrast to McCaughey's figures and footnotes. But both women have an uncanny ability to shovel their toxic nonsense with nary a blink, tremor, or break in those dazzling smiles. People of goodwill and honest counsel don't stand a chance.

Michelle Cottle is a senior editor of The New Republic.

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