The White House is lining up the players for implementation of the health insurance reform provisions coming up in September.

Via the Billings Gazette:

HELENA — Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law.

Fowler, chief health counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, will become deputy director of the Office of Consumer Information and Oversight at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Liz Fowler is an extremely knowledgeable and dedicated adviser, and while I’m very proud of her new position, she will certainly be missed at the committee,” Baucus said in a statement Tuesday.

Baucus, D-Mont., led the Democrats’ efforts in the Senate the past two years to draft and pass a major health-reform bill, which President Barack Obama signed into law March 23.

Fowler's appointment has fired up a hot discussion about her past association with Wellpoint.

Marcy Wheeler:

This is the kind of “oversight” that resulted in the BP disaster.

And remember Obama’s lobbyist restrictions? The ones that prevent someone from working in the Executive Branch on an issue that they’ve lobbied Congress on for two years? Fowler was not a registered lobbyist; rather, she was the VP of Public Policy and External Affairs. But in any case, it appears that Fowler returned to MaxTax Baucus’ staff on March 4, 2008, so nothing prevents the former VP of WellPoint from writing the “consumer and oversight” rules that are the only thing protecting Americans from policies — like WellPoint’s — that screw consumers.

Marcy is correct: Fowler was not a registered lobbyist, nor was she acting as a lobbyist in her two years with Wellpoint. In fact, if you look over Fowler's entire career, she is a career public servant. One might even argue that private industry and Ms. Fowler were not a great "fit", as noted here:

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.

So what exactly is the problem? She's not a lobbyist; most of her career has been spent in public service; and she was the head of a 20-person team that drafted the Senate Finance Committee version of the reform bill.

Fowler headed up a team of 20-some Senate Finance Committee staffers who helped draft the bill in the Senate. She was Baucus’ top health care aide from 2001-2005 and left that job in 2006 to become an executive at WellPoint, the nation’s largest private insurer.

It's worth noting that the Senate Finance Reform committee version was certainly included in the Senate version of what ultimately became the Affordable Care Act, but so too were provisions from the Senate HELP Committee's version. Harry Reid, as you might recall, combined pieces of both to make the Senate bill, and that version included a watered-down, ineffective public option which was ultimately stripped away from the final version because Joe Lieberman wanted to punish liberals more than he wanted to see people have access to health care.

Liz Fowler didn't take out the public option. She didn't kill it. And she didn't lobby against it. Is it possible that she simply has a different policy opinion from others? Or that she actually doesn't have a different opinion but made a calculation about what was possible with this Senate Finance Committee?

Health care, whether it's government-run single payer or covered by private insurers, is one of the most complex areas of public policy there is. Implementation of the Affordable Care Act needs policy wonks at the helm. If Liz Fowler is anything at all, she is a policy wonk, one who has earned a doctorate and a law degree, and who has spent her entire career in the policy area of health care.

Seems like a natural choice to me. Don't forget she also worked for Pete Stark (an ardent single payer advocate). Why does the Wellpoint 2 years carry more weight than the Stark/Moynihan? Because it fits the narrative or because there's evidence of malfeasance? If there's evidence, where is it? A difference of opinion over policy does not mean corruption is afoot.

Something to consider, anyway.

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In our new book Over The Cliff, David and I explain how the Tea Party was created and where they stand ideologically. That ideology happens to be conservatism -- which, under the impetus of the Tea Parties, has become a right-wing populist movement.

We also prove that FOX News, right-wing publications and AM talk radio actively created an opposing party dedicated to attacking a newly elected President. And the man that won was the first African American elected to our country's highest office. That was unprecedented in American history. Never before have media outlets worked in conjunction to whip up an intense hatred for an incoming administration even before they took office.

A new study done by Democracy Corp reveals, as we did, that the Tea Parties are nothing more than an extension of the conservative movement, a chance for the Republican Party to rebrand itself in the right-wing populist mold. They are not just some all-American/grassroots congregation of dissatisfied people, as they like to portray themselves.

• 86 percent of Tea Party supporters and activists identify with or lean to the Republican Party.
• 79 percent identify as conservatives.

Poll after poll tells us the same thing, so I wish the media would just get with it already and stop making them into something they are not. If they need any more convincing, the study also reveals that Tea Partiers overwhelmingly believe President Obama is a socialist.

Tea Party activists and supporters see Obama as the defining and motivating threat to the country and its well-being, typified by his socialist agenda. Among supporters, 90 percent say the socialist label describes Obama well and 68 percent say it describes him very well. Obama fares no better on the other attributes tested: nine-in-10 think he is too liberal (93 percent) and a big spender (90 percent).

The driving force behind their negativity toward Obama is the belief that his actions and goals are un-American. Throughout the focus groups, people repeatedly invoked “Obama’s Socialist Agenda” – with the occasional communism comment thrown in.

Can you name many left-leaning American voters who actually think Obama has been acting like a socialist? If anything, the nosedive in Obama's poll numbers is a result of him not being progressive enough.

Fox News ranks as the leading agitator of this newly formed group, and one of their primary methods of whipping up their base is to use the the divisive tactic of race-baiting. They are reaching into the darkest corners of right-wing hatred which target the poor and non-whites in our society. It's a familiar strategy to anyone who knows history, and now we know that it never really died out, as many of us think it did. This country has taken decades to repair the damage inflicted by this kind of politics -- and now it's returning.

The very type of racist resentment Tony Snow famously proclaimed was dead is alive and well, and Fox has been injecting race into the public discourse as a wedge issue. It's ugly and vile, but it's touched a nerve with Republicans and it's the primary source of information for Tea Partiers:

The only news source that participants said they could trust was Fox.

If that's the case, then how does Glenn Beck rate with the Tea Partiers?

Glenn Beck is the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters of the people we tested. He scores an extraordinarily high 75 percent warm rating, 57 percent very warm.

This affinity for Beck came through very clearly in the focus groups. The only news source that participants said they could trust was Fox. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity were cited as people who “are not afraid to tell it like it is” and support their arguments with solid facts. Beck was undoubtedly the hero in these groups. Participants consider him an “educator” (in contrast to the popular Rush Limbaugh who is an “entertainer”) who teaches people history and puts himself at risk because he exposes the truth. In the words of a woman in Ft. Lauderdale, “I would trust my life in his hands.”

Other comments are just as laudatory:

I like the way he’s trying to get back to the basics of the Constitution of the United States because I think that’s where our government is losing focus. They’re trying to change the Constitution or somehow twist it…

He brings out facts… And he actually shows the people saying the things. It’s not like just sound bites. It’s not chopped and really edited. And he is scary because every time I watch the show, which is pretty much every day, my heart feels…and I feel like I want to do something.

I’m frightened for him… Because of the things that he says. I think that he is stepping on some big toes.

He really does his research and he really lays it out to you well; a good professor.

That's right. The people in the focus groups actually believe that when Glenn Beck whips out his chalk and blackboards and gives them lessons about the history of America---they buy it hook, line and sinker.

Digby believes that this is really a big problem and I concur.

Racism has been at the core of the Tea Partiers' outrage. Glenn Beck has stoked this racial resentment in successive steps, each one a bit further, beginning with his charge that President Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people", or the "white culture."

And there's some ugly eliminationism there, too -- especially his vicious attacks on progressives, comparing them to diseases and vermin and calling for them to be excised from society. Glenn pretends to be a professor then, too -- trotting out "experts" like Jonah Goldberg to produce "documentaries" portraying progressives as the source of the world's great genocides.

But to Tea Partiers, he's only educating them. I think Americans understand the impact Martin Luther King had on American history, so Glenn Beck has fixed his racist views onto a hero of African Americans and is planning an event that is as disgusting as it sounds.

On August 28, Glenn Beck plans to hijack Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech by marching on DC so he can try to claim it for his own nativist self.

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