Sanjay Gupta is Obama's Pick for Surgeon General; Some Progressives (Including this One) Greet the Choice Without Enthusiasm and With Mild Grumbling

by Damozel | According to The Washington Post, Obama would like Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general.  Gupta, a neurosurgeon, is a CNN correspondent.  As one of my friends would say, he's certainly extremely  attractive (skippy's caption to that same photo:  "Dr. Sanjay Gupta, forgetting to drain the swamp", heh) 

Gupta also certainly has the background in public policy wonking.

The Michigan-born son of parents who were born in India, Gupta has always been drawn to health policy. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of South Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman.

His role as journalist and physician have sometimes overlapped. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy. (WaPo)

Apparently he's hesitating over whether he can afford to make less money---he has a pregnant wife and two children.  Oh, cry me a river. 

If it sounds as if I don't like him, that's only because I don't.  Like Paul Krugman, I remember CNN's (and Gupta's) war with Michael Moore over Sicko----a fight in which Gupta was absolutely right and Moore absolutely wrong, although many of Moore's sneering critics don't seem to recall this.  I still hear, even from Democrats, about how Moore's data was "fudged" so that the film is unreliable.  Krugman points to this article.   And he says:

You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

At The Reaction, Michael Stickings comments:

t seems to me that what is needed in a surgeon general is also someone who can make the case for, or at least someone who is supportive of, a reformed public health care system, given that this seems to be, as many of us hope it genuinely is, one of Obama's main policy priorities. But is Gupta an advocate of such reform? I have my doubts. As he exposed in his critique of Michael Moore's movie Sicko back in July 2007, he seems to be very much a part of, as well as a defender of, the status quo, namely, the corporatized health care system controlled by Big Pharma and the HMOs. As I put it then, he picked apart Moore's movie, avoided subjecting the existing system and/or Moore's critics to similar evaluation, and failed to address the most serious flaws of the American system, namely, the enormous costs even to those with insurance and the utter lack of insurance for millions." So is this really the man who should be the spokesman for public health in the United States?

John Aravosis posted this clip at AMERICAblog:

As Stickings says, it would be great to have a high-profile, good-looking/glamourous SG who already has his own audience---provided, of course, that he's on board with health care reform.  I say:  I bet Gupta would not have been Hillary's pick and I have some reservations about Obama's complete commitment to the sort of reform we need on other grounds, only one of which was his reprisal of "Harry and Louise" during the primaries (Krugman didn't like it either).   I like Obama a lot etc., but add this to the small roster of incidents that make me uneasy on this score. 

Another concern about Gupta's dissing of Moore is its reflection of what Digby and many progressive bloggers call "the villagers"---i.e., political insiders---and their reflexive response to those outside their fold.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right...[A]ppointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way  (Krugman)

On the Gupta appointment, skippy says:

it could be worse, we suppose...obama could have picked wolf blitzer as sec. of defense.

Maybe this view is unfairly jaded.  Sandip Roy at Huff Post thinks it's a great pick, though.  His only concern is that Gupta's success will make life even harder on young Americans of South Asian extraction.

It's exciting to see someone who comes from your stock make it big. The South Asian Journalists Association forum is justifiably excited about someone "oh-so-cute and eminently mediagenic". But another neurosurgeon-makes-good story is going to make the rest of us look even more like underachievers...

Not only is he dashing and articulate. Not only did he do brain surgery on a 2 -year-old Iraqi boy while embedded during the Iraq war, now he might be the new Surgeon-general. Let me pause, and reel in the envy!

And his only qualm, according to the Washington Post "is said to involve the financial impact on his pregnant wife and two children if he gives up his lucrative medical and journalistic careers."

Golly. This is a South Asian parent's dream. He's 39 and he's already followed the four stages of a good Hindu life - childhood, education, family and now a sort-of-renunciation-and-service...Smart, media-savvy and articulate, Sanjay Gupta will surely make a great Surgeon-General. I guess I just don't want to listen to my mother go on about it..

I can see that.   And after all, what's a little back and forthing in the media with an irritating fat guy everyone mocks---even when he's right and you're...not--- when you're all that? 

I'm sure he'll be fine.  By which I mean:  "We'll see."

Memeorandum has more.

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Comments

[flowerplough]

Latest high-level Cabineteers from Mr. Hopey Change, yet another Clintoon double dip with the intern date-raper's old Chief of Staff, Panetta, for intelligence, and a TV reporter who sometimes moonlights as a real doctor, a former writer of speeches and crafter of policy for Hillary Clinton, for Surgeon General.

Like I done said before, 'Bammy looks like the dog that actually caught the car, but now doesn't know what to do with it. Got elected on change, but is now reduced to digging the spare change out of Bubba Bill's old coat pockets. Only new-face appointment I've seen "The One" involved with is the Senator-in-waiting Burris that he unwittingly assisted crook Blagojevich with.