In the health care debate, there is no escape from Betsy McCaughey. In 1994, the tenacious policy wonk wrote an inaccurate TNR piece that killed Hillarycare; today she's the originator of the "death panels." But there's much, much more. As Michelle Cottle explains in her new profile of McCaughey, her rise from obscurity to the lieutenant governorship of New York was marked by sexual politics and class resentment befitting an East Coast version of Sarah Palin. Click through this slideshow for a history of the many lives of Betsy McCaughey.
Born to a working class family in Pittsburgh, McCaughey earned a scholarship at Vassar and received a Ph.D in history from Columbia. Having vowed only to date Yale men, she wedded investment banker Thomas McCaughey and dabbled in a number of careers. All that changed after her divorce in 1992.
She transformed herself into a policy wonk. With help from a board member, McCaughey secured a fellowship at the conservative Manhattan Institute, where she wrote "No Exit"--a scathing vivisection of the Clinton health plan that appeared in The New Republic. Her claims were dramatic: “Hillary Rodham Clinton assured a Boston audience that the government will not limit what you can pay your doctor. The text of the bill proves these statements are untrue.”
McCaughey's article was an instant hit among Republicans. Its credibility rested on her insistence that she was one of the few people who had read the entire bill. Yet, as Cottle explains, McCaughey's conclusions were "fundamentally incorrect--or grossly dishonest depending on your view of her." Still, they became a key argument that doomed Clinton's reforms.
Spying a way to pick up moderate female votes, political kingmaker Alfonse D’Amato encouraged McCaughey to run for lieutenant governor of New York, on a ticket with George Pataki. She was a cultural sensation--the New York Post claimed she combined “Henry Kissinger’s brains and Jessica Rabbit’s body.
In office, McCaughey and Pataki did not have a working relationship. Pataki chose to ignore her policy recommendations, while she publicly denounced his staff and his leadership, accusing them of "McCarthyism." Pataki's chief spokesperson was baffled by McCaughey's behavior. "How do you describe someone who is too bizarre to describe?"
Pataki chose to drop McCaughey from his ticket for the 1998 reelection campaign. In response, McCaughey switched parties and tried to run against Pataki as a Democrat—bankrolled by her new husband, billionaire Wilbur Ross. He soon withdrew his funds as a prelude to divorce, and she lost the Democratic primary before running as the Liberal Party candidate in the general election.
During the campaign, McCaughey sold herself as the victim of a sexist political establishment. Soon after Wilbur Ross stopped bankrolling her campaign, she explained to The Washington Post that "Women, especially, are saying to me, 'You go, girl!'" Yet she didn’t pick up many supporters, taking only two percent of votes in the general election.
Her political career over, McCaughey filed a $40 million fraud lawsuit alleging that her husband had broken a promise to fund her unconditionally. Then she moved to the Hudson Institute, where she launched a campaign against hospital-contracted infections.
Now health care reform is back, and so is McCaughey. She's been wielding a huge binder of statistics at "tea party" protests and on the talk show circuit. In articles, she has smeared Rahm Emanuel's brother Zeke as "doctor death," and originated the claim that Obama's reforms would save money by forcing end-of-life counseling on seniors. (The idea morphed into Sarah Plain’s "Death Panels.")
The argumentative style that made "No Exit" so devastating was on display during her recent appearance on "The Daily Show." Jon Stewart was flabbergasted as McCaughey proceeded 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." Will it ever end?
Click here to read Michelle Cottle's new profile of Besty McCaughey.
Click here to read Besty McCaughey's infamous 1994 essay about the Clinton health plan.
Click here to read TNR's regrets about McCaughey's article, and our case for universal health care.
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