I agree that this doesn’t really demonstrate Obama’s intelligence, nor is it especially impressive for a President to get published anywhere.
I do take some pride as a Democrat at the idea that, for us, a publicity stunt is publishing an article in JAMA. I’ll take faux intellectualism over anti-intellectualism every time.
So did he write it or was it ghost written and his signature added? I’m assuming the latter, but I have no idea if you have to actually write the article to put your name on it in the JAMA. I know he is smart enough, but he has to be pressed for time and something like that would take dozens of hours to write.
Did I hear the mike hit the floor or was that mike drop in my head?
Skimming through the article, I don’t see anything in there that is not at the same level as his remarks during a press conference. Obama clearly knows how to write - he has some books after all before he could afford a ghost writer - so I don’t see why this article couldn’t have been written by him or dictated, with the people mentioned cleaning up grammar, finding the references and charts, and doing the references (always a pain.)
If this were a clinical study or something I’d wonder. But this paper is policy, and has nothing that Obama couldn’t do himself.
Does JAMA have a commentary section? Science does. But this paper is better referenced and supported than most of the commentary I’ve ever seen, like in Science or in an Op-Ed piece.
There was a halo effect here for sure. But not all papers are research contributions. In my field at least there are survey articles and tutorials also. In fact I’m reviewing what is more or less a survey paper right now.
And this is a pretty short paper also. Given that much of the material was already available, I doubt it would have taken dozens of hours just to write. To edit and argue about wording, that maybe.
I feel like there’s an implicit conflict of interest that isn’t really covered by the earnings report.
It doesn’t seem to be all that long and I’m sure that he knew everything there was to be included, he just had to tell some people to fetch the most recent numbers.
So if you don’t really have to do much research - because you’ve been swimming in the numbers for 8 years anyways - and other people can collect the spreadsheets for you - it probably doesn’t take more than a few hours to put together.
Why does he only call for a public option for the 12% of people who do not have enough competition in the marketplace? A public option will spur competition everywhere, it should be available to 100% of people.
In fact they should put medicare, medicaid and the VA on the exchanges, so people have 3 different public plans to pick from.