Huh. It seems the website for The Daily Beast is redirecting to the Texas Tourism Bureau.*
Tina Brown’s newly digital-only rag publishes a lot of weird stuff — see Niall Ferguson’s much-ridiculed and fact-challenged critique of Obama, or this week’s even more bizarre anti-gun control rant from David Mamet, which descends into Tea Party capitalization of every word from “Government to “Left” to “Disarmament” — but the strangest thing I’ve read lately on the site comes courtesy Mark McKinnon, the No Labels founder who champions non-partisanship while providing cover to faux-intellecutal, Medicare-slashing deficit hawks. McKinnon has penned an article titled “If Washington Wants To Balance Its Books, Congress Could Learn Something from Texas.” It reads as a typical, Wall Street Journal-style paean to a low-tax, low-regulation state. While ostensibly trumpeting the budgetary genius of Comptroller Susan Combs, the Lone Star equivalent of No Labels favorite David Walker (a former U.S. comptroller touted as a “centrist” whose fulsome praise of Paul Ryan betrayed his true status as a conservative stalking horse), the article is really a big, fat unpaid advertisement for Texas. First McKinnon indulges in the delusion that the only way to evaluate a state is by a Club for Growth measure like “business climate”:
In Texas money goes further, with one of the lowest costs of living, one of the lightest tax burdens as a percent of income, and one of the lowest debt per capita ratios.
Well, wowser! I guess it doesn’t matter that the average wage is among the lowest in the nation, or that Texas leads all 50 states in the number of uninsured residents — a fact that Rick Perry, who has rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, has no desire to remedy.
McKinnon maintains his obsession with the deficit, an issue that he has pursued with a relentlessness second only to the corporate-funded Fix the Debt folks, who would rather knock some dollars off the country’s Visa bill than tackle the unemployment problem or lend a hand to the financially stagnating middle class.
But the idea I find most interesting is requiring that every ballot measure in every bond election include the current amount of outstanding debt, the annual debt service payment, and how the proposed new debt will impact that figure. Here especially, information is power to the people.
“Power to the people” is a No Labels/Americans Elect catchphrase, but to McKinnon it apparently means the power to reject federal funding for women’s health care, slash funding for education, and set the income level for food stamps so low that a working parent can’t earn more than 27 percent of the poverty limit — Perry-era achievements, all.
But wait — it gets worse. There are plenty of conservative hacks praising states like Texas, where the minimum wage is rock-bottom and polluting companies are given get-out-of-jail-free cards. Unless the piece in question is an op-ed written by a governor or senator, however, the tone is usually more sober than laughably extravagant. Hyperbole is one thing; unhinged hyperbole is quite another. McKinnon’s boosterism is so lavish that he sounds as if he has come straight from the Visitors Information Bureau. He’s not content to dispense factoids like “Continually ranked the best state for businesses large or small, Texas added more than one-third of all new private-sector jobs from 2002 through 2012.” No, he takes it ten steps further, morphing into an official from the state’s tourism department. Texas isn’t just great at transparency, it is “leading the way.”
The piece de resistance:
Not immune to the challenges every state faces, the Texas Legislature, which meets only 140 days every other year, continues to focus on improving education outcomes, expanding healthcare options, and ensuring an adequate water supply to meet increasing population, agriculture and industry demands.
I can only assume this was copied verbatim from a Lone Star advertising brochure. Despite such huge challenges, Texas forges ahead! The legislature is such a model of efficiency that it only meets every other year! For 140 days! How it will tackle such nebulous problems as “expanding healthcare options” is beyond me, given that Perry has rejected the “option” of expanding coverage to his state’s poor. And if you’d like your healthcare options to include Planned Parenthood — well, you’re out of luck. Texas has stripped funding from those evil baby-killers, choosing instead to devote state funds to the sort of crisis pregnancy centers that counsel women about Jesus and promote discredited links between abortion and breast cancer.
The Madison Avenue language, the ad-ready copy . . . It’s enough to make you wonder whether the entire piece is a joke. Quick: The Daily Beast, or The Onion? Or perhaps just text cadged from TravelTex.com, where the motto is “It’s like a whole other country.” Wait — I’ve heard that somewhere before. Oh, right: the opening of McKinnon’s article:
Far more than 1,500 miles separate Austin, Texas, from Washington, D.C. The Lone Star State is really a whole ‘nother country.
Such sycophantic largesse can only be satire, right? If McKinnon isn’t on Rick Perry’s payroll, I’ll eat my Stetson. A few weeks back, The Atlantic caught a lot of flak for running a poorly labeled “paid content” advertorial for the Church of Scientology that painted a relentlessly positive picture of the controversial organization and its leader. The advertorial was eventually pulled, but its message was hardly any worse than McKinnon’s — and at least The Atlantic had the dignity not to attempt to pass the puff piece off as editorial content.
The Atlantic:
2012 was a milestone year for Scientology, with the religion expanding to more than 10,000 Churches, Missions and affiliated groups, spanning 167 nations–figures that represent a growth rate 20 times that of a decade ago.
McKinnon:
The state’s unemployment rate has fallen to a four-year low of 6.2 percent – even with its population explosion and the highest number of inbound moves from other states over the last 10 years.
The Atlantic:
The driving force behind this unparalleled era of growth is David Miscavige, ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion. Mr. Miscavige is unrelenting in his work for millions of parishioners and the cities served by Scientology Churches. …
McKinnon:
Combs tells taxpayers in Texas – and across the nation – that not only is the increasing debt burden theirs, so too is the power to do something about it . . . .Combs reflects the right kind of thinking in Texas, and is already leading the way to improve transparency and accountability.
All that’s missing is the requisite “Paid Content” disclaimer that even The Atlantic had the good sense to append to its Miscavige hagiography. I doubt a mea culpa like that put out by The Atlantic will be forthcoming from the Daily Beast. After all, McKinnon’s piece is supposedly editorial, not advertising. That’s a hard illusion to maintain, however, when you read such choice bits as these:
Here, Texas Comptroller Susan Combs is urging taxpayers to demand more – more answers, that is.
McKinnon surely has a career awaiting him at Young & Rubicam, J Walter Thompson, or BBDO. At McDonalds, you get more for your money — more burger, that is!
More junior-level ad copy:
And though the state may be mocked for its swagger, Texas has all the cattle to go with the hat.
Washington could learn a lesson or two (or even a few trillion) from the Texas model
Congress needs to look to the states – like Texas, where a balanced budget is constitutionally required, where spending decisions are tied directly to projected revenue, and where “power to the people” is actually the model of governance.
Self-proclaimed “pragmatists” like McKinnon come up with a lot of risible arguments to justify their all-encompassing desire to slash spending, but rarely do they make it so impossible for the reader to keep a straight face. McKinnon’s in-kind contribution to the Texas Tourism Bureau isn’t likely to go viral in the way of Tina Brown’s infamous “Dead Diana” cover or the asparagus-fellatio photo. But it does prove that, even without a print edition, The Daily Beast will maintain its Newsweek-era reputation for continually hitting new lows.
* Disclaimer: Not an actual screenshot from DTB. Duh.
. . . So Well Read. . . 