Like many of the boomers whom it was courting, AARP itself turned fifty in 2008 and celebrated with an enhanced “Life @ 50+” celebration in Washington, D.C., just after Labor Day. The organization’s multigenerational outreach was heralded in the conference theme of “Generations Connecting to Change.” Throughout the giant Washington, D.C., Convention Center, Ethel Percy Andrus’s portraits, life story, and favorite slogans (“To serve, not be served”) were everywhere. The long-deceased female founder’s name was most frequently invoked during opening day welcoming speeches by AARP officials and by a company of actors portraying the history of AARP.
This would be Bill Novelli’s last performance as ringmaster for the annual event. He skillfully mixed Andrus’s simple legacy with his own increasingly ambitious and extensive AARP agenda. He especially highlighted the conference themes of an increased focus on younger generations and on global aging and international alliances. (There was a hospitality suite in the convention center for AARP’s global affiliates.) He also hailed the efforts of the “Divided We Fail” health care reform alliance. (The hybrid donkey-elephant logo was a ubiquitous feature in the convention center).
The main event at this fiftieth-anniversary celebration was a star-studded gala in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the afternoon of the conference’s opening day. The event featured several well-known speakers, including the NASCAR celebrity driver Richard Petty, the country singer Wynona Rider, the movie star Sally Field, and the daughter of Martin Luther King. But though official conference total registration was approximately 27,500, only about 4,500 people attended the Lincoln Memorial ceremonies. Approximately half of those who braved the muggy heat were conscripts—employees drafted from AARP’s vast D.C. headquarters, readily identifiable by their red “AARP 50th Anniversary” T-shirts. Transportation was another problem. The event was nearly a mile from the nearest Washington Metro subway stop, and there were long lines for chartered buses at the convention center. Hundreds of chairs on the hot, sunny north side of the long reflecting pool remained empty—most of the audience favored sitting or standing on the shadier south side. Some of the presentations were temporarily drowned out by commercial jet aircraft passing low overhead on their landing paths into Reagan National Airport, just across the Potomac. Despite the heat, disappointing attendance, and descending aircraft, however, the planners were very lucky that the outdoor ceremony took place only forty hours before the remnants of Hurricane Hanna hit the capital with high winds and torrents of rain.
The storm’s arrival on Saturday morning did not dampen conference goers’ enthusiasm for a satellite teleconference with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at 8:30 a.m. About four thousand AARP members packed the convention center ballroom to listen to Obama give a short speech and then field questions from Bill Novelli via a satellite uplink. (At the conclusion, many in the audience enthusiastically burst into a rhythmic campaign chant, “O-bam-a! O-bama!”) A few hours later, a similar satellite interchange with Republican candidate John McCain drew only a few hundred people; indeed, the crowd was so sparse and placid that AARP conference staff pleaded with the audience to move closer to the front of the ballroom to give to McCain and the television networks recording the event the illusion of a larger gathering.
This obvious political tilt was an embarrassment to an organization striving to present itself as a nonpartisan microcosm for all of fifty-plus America. And the conference crowds illustrated other continuing demographic imbalances as well.
First, the Life @ 50+ audiences illustrated that an aging society is an increasingly female society. Though AARP’s official membership is 55 percent female, perhaps two-thirds of those attending the Washington, D.C., Life @ 50+ were women. Single men seemed very scarce. There were many married couples. But what was striking were the large numbers of single, divorced, or widowed women—almost always in the company of one or two others. Many to whom I spoke evidently viewed the three-day conference as an opportunity for a “girls’ night out.” It was mostly women who streamed into the aisles and rushed to the front of the cavernous, convention center hall when (on their respective concert nights) both Paul Simon and members of the band Chicago invited the audience to come down and “party” in front of the stage. Clusters of women were even more apparent at the Life @ 50+ music-and-dance clubs, which (as at previous conventions) featured classic rock, Latin, and blues/soul entertainment. (Rock band numbers that featured line dancing—requiring no partners—filled the ballroom dance floor with women.)
Second, AARP continues to struggle with ethnic and cultural diversity issues. Though influenced by the Washington, D.C., setting (with its majority African American population), the conference’s demographics illustrated the gap between the nation’s urban demographic landscape and AARP’s still overwhelmingly white (89 percent) and middle-class registered membership. Yet AARP’s marked emphasis on ethnic diversity in conference keynote speakers, lecture topics, and entertainment produced the paradoxical results typical of such efforts throughout American society: an uneasy mix of both unity and separatism.
The closing keynote speakers Quincy Jones and Maya Angelou (the latter a perennial Life @ 50+ favorite) provided a sense of warm, color-transcending unity. (This may have been because—as both of them noted—they had received instructions to avoid political commentary.) The conference hall was crowded, and during question-and-answer sessions many whites gushed effusively that they were honored to be “in their presence.” (One white inner-city high school teacher choked back sobs when he asked Angelou’s advice on dealing with burnout and the desire to quit.) Yet the audiences attending the three major evening concerts provided reminders of persistent, deep cultural preferences. The Thursday night concert featuring Chaka Khan and Natalie Cole drew the most African Americans; there were far fewer blacks at the Friday night concert by the all-white rock band Chicago; and perhaps 90 percent of those attending the concluding Saturday evening concert by 1960s-era singer Paul Simon were white. (That audience witnessed an impressive postconcert fiftieth-anniversary light show featuring showers of golden confetti shot from mock cannons.)
In his last year as CEO, Bill Novelli held fast to his formula for building a more ethnically inclusive, multigenerational, big-tent AARP by emphasizing common values and life concerns. He explained to me,
When I first came here, the question was still on the table as to whether AARP could appeal to baby boomers and recruit them as members—while still staying loyal and relevant to older members. A third of our members are now boomers, so the answer is yes. The differences between boomers and older people are more superficial, surface characteristics. Their wants are somewhat different. But when you get down to the level of needs, everyone needs health and health care and they need long-term financial security. Then, when you get down to the level of values, all generations are the same: they want a better world for their children and grandchildren; they want to leave the world a better place and to leave a legacy. These are common values, and that’s what we’ve built upon.1
The 1.6 million-member “Divided We Fail” health care reform alliance was just such a multigroup vehicle for “connecting generations for change.” The campaign’s emphasis on health care access, affordability, and quality for all Americans broadened the organization’s “brand” appeal and rebutted critics’ charges that AARP was a “greedy geezer” lobby. The alliance with business organizations and failure to even mention government-funded health care system (similar to Canada’s) blunted conservative accusations that AARP was merely a Democratic front for big-government programs. Finally, Divided We Fail’s focus on total health care reform tried to shift the focus away from Medicare and the popular definition of the elderly as “problems.” It made everyone a stakeholder in change.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, by the end of 2008, the Divided We Fail campaign could be credited with helping to keep the issue of health care reform publicly visible and not entirely eclipsed by the economic crises. Divided We Fail unquestionably articulated and advanced the “access-affordability-quality” themes eventually incorporated into the title of the 2010 Democrat-backed comprehensive health care reform legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Indeed, by the end of 2008, AARP’s Divided We Fail Web page proclaimed that more than two-thirds of new Congress members (though comparatively few Republicans) registered agreement with the goals of Divided We Fail. And the Obama White House Agenda page on health care reform, Social Security, and several other issues reflected substantial agreement with AARP.
And so the man that Alan Simpson had sarcastically dubbed “the Wizard of Oz” had successfully maneuvered AARP into a primary role in the most important entitlement debates since Social Security and Medicare were founded. But this mission would not be an easy one. A. Barry Rand, Novelli’s successor and the first African American to head AARP, must continue to juggle many competing interests and navigate some of the most turbulent political waters ever encountered by the age fifty-plus organization.
“A new era in Washington has begun!” was Bill Novelli’s 2009 New Year’s e-mail greeting to AARP members. “Our time is now!”
Or so it seemed.
After the 2008 election, AARP’s Grassroots America advocacy unit notified its six million members to e-mail or write their congressional representatives and President Obama to take action on four major issues: (1) making health care more affordable, (2) protecting and strengthening Social Security, (3) safeguarding and improving pensions and retirement savings plans, and (4) keeping age discrimination out of the workplace.2
These goals were general, bland, and almost apolitical. Most Americans would likely agree with them without a second thought. Indeed, before the 2009 health care reform battles, most Americans and even a majority of AARP members may have been largely unaware of AARP’s politics. (New York Times “Generation B” columnist Michael Winerip admitted to me that he utilized data from AARP but knew little about their politics.3 So did Examiner.com’s baby boomer columnist Paul Briand.)4
For those who have been culturally and politically attuned, however, AARP’s publications, conferences, advocacy campaigns, Web page, and other aspects of its public face reveal an organizational culture and politics that is moderately liberal—largely a reflection of the culture and ideology of the upper-middle and professional classes discussed at length in chapter 3. This worldview is built upon an often tacit, taken-for-granted acceptance of globalization, mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the belief that the nation’s economy, growing age/class/ethnic schisms, and civic culture can be “managed” in a bipartisan fashion. AARP’s publications and other media appear to reflect the culture and mores of the Beltway leadership elite and its house organs, the New York Times and the Washington Post. (AARP’s magazine cover stories and convention events also regularly feature Hollywood celebrities, many of whom are perceived to be liberal.) And, as illustrated at the end of the previous chapter, AARP vigorously celebrates diversity, including gay/lesbian/transgender lifestyles and rights. (In 2009 the AARP Web page had a major feature on the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Greenwich Village Stonewall riots, a response to a New York City police raid on a gay tavern historically regarded as the trigger of the modern gay rights movement.)
In a July 2010 interview, Novelli told me that one of his achievements as AARP’s CEO was to make it a more “pragmatic, middle-of-the-road organization.” Perhaps. Politically, it is difficult to distinguish most of AARP’s “nonpartisan” policy positions from those of moderate Democrats. Under its 501(c)(4) IRS status, AARP may address issues affecting older Americans through a variety of means, including lobbying efforts at the state and national governmental level, but it is not supposed to support, oppose, or donate to political parties or candidates. Yet AARP’s e-mail advocacy list of six million and its Congresswatch Web site seem far more positively attuned to Democratic congressional or White House proposals. In early 2008, AARP lobbied for expansion of the States Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which passed Congress but was vetoed by President Bush. (In January 2009, President Obama signed an identical act.) In the fall of 2008, AARP utilized its grassroots lobbying network to mobilize 110,000 e-mails to Congress members to support the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank rescue legislation.5 In January 2009, the advocacy network rallied its e-mail troops to support the economic stimulus package.
Two-thirds of AARP’s 2008 Congressional Awards recipients were Democrats.6 And while AARP did not directly endorse any of the 2008 presidential candidates, AARP Magazine’s three-way comparison of Barack Obama, John McCain, and AARP on key issues constituted a de facto Obama recommendation. On commitment to ending gridlock, ensuring Social Security (without diverting funds into individual accounts), establishing automatic payroll deductions for IRAs, preserving Medicare, and enacting health care reform, AARP and candidate Obama were in full agreement. McCain refused to participate. (His strategists no doubt sensed a trap. Had McCain agreed with AARP on more than one or two issues, he would have been pilloried by GOP conservatives; and if he appeared weak on Social Security or Medicare, he might have lost the senior vote—as it turned out, the only age group that he carried.)7
By 2010, AARP’s Web page featured a “Yourvote” section that enabled interested members and nonmembers alike to use zip-code focusing to compare AARP’s policy positions issues with those of local congressional and statewide office candidates. As with the Obama-McCain comparisons, AARP did not explicitly endorse candidates that agreed with its positions—though the implicit intent was fairly obvious.
ARP’s officials and researchers tend to deny its center-left political persona altogether or to state that, in any case, public perceptions of its alleged liberalism have little effect on attracting new members. Their internal research indicates that the political views of their membership reflect those of the general electorate.8 Still, AARP seemed unprepared for the gathering storm that their support for Democratic-sponsored health care reform (see below) would elicit from an apparently wide range of members.
AARP’s long-term tilt toward Democratic Party positions was becoming risky on several fronts. First, it jeopardized the “nonpartisan trust” brand vital to AARP’s products-and-services enterprises. Second, consistent support of Democratic objectives gave credence to Republicans’ and conservatives’ complaints that AARP promoted a partisan political agenda that, along with its insurance and financial sales, called into question its non-profit 504(c) status. Third, this somewhat left-of-center stance still failed to please committed liberal Democrats who continued to complain that AARP was primarily a money-making machine that too readily sold out political for commercial interests—such as the refusal to promote a Canadian-style single-payer health care agenda.9 Finally, support of Democratic initiatives tied AARP to the short- or long-term success or failure of those efforts. Thus, though AARP endorsement of the 2008 TARP legislation and the 2009 Obama Democrats’ stimulus package, budget, and health care bills proved successful in the short term, the organization would be held responsible by millions of members if the economy did not recover or—especially—if there were reductions in Medicare services.
“We own Social Security and Medicare,” an AARP board member told me emphatically in mid-2008. But this same board member admitted an increasingly obvious policy stance open to compromise and cutbacks—usually signaled by official calls to “preserve Social Security and Medicare for future generations.” But how great the compromise and how stern the limits? This was soon to be tested.
As the health care reform battle lines took shape in the spring of 2009, AARP’s new president, A. Barry Rand, and his staff donned their warrior-brand armor. Rand emphasized the organization’s interests in enhancing and preserving Medicare. The first major goal was to close the gap in Medicare’s supplemental drug coverage gap known as the “donut hole.” A second aim was to create a Medicare “transitional benefit,” for supportive services needed after hospitalization. A third AARP priority was to ensure that younger members, aged fifty to sixty-four, had a “choice of affordable health care” (though AARP did not advocate a proposal once floated by President Clinton—lowering the eligibility age for Medicare).10
The goal of at least partially closing the Medicare prescription coverage drug “donut hole” was achieved in July. In a White House ceremony with Barry Rand at his side, President Obama proudly announced that AARP and the pharmaceutical industry—aided by Congress and the Obama White House—had reached an agreement to lower drug prices 50 percent for Medicare recipients who were in the donut-hole coverage gap. (AARP lost a separate battle for lower drug prices when the Congress health care reform plan included a pharmaceutical industry request for twelve-year market exclusivity for branded biotechnology drugs—no competition from cheaper generic brands during that period.)11 But AARP’s other stated health care reform goals of cutting the growth of health care costs through rational measurement, management, and elimination of “wasteful” Medicare practices began to arouse suspicions of redistribution and rationing.12
At the beginning of President Barack Obama’s new term, the AARP Web site featured a YouTube video clip of Bill Novelli and President Obama publicly agreeing about the priority of comprehensive, cost-effective health care at a White House Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The video drew mostly critical comments from the Right and from the Left. Conservatives were suspicious of “socialism”; liberals pleaded for a single-payer, government-financed system like Canada’s.
One posted comment in particular signaled AARP’s strategic dilemma regarding boomers and older Americans: whether to defend and maximize Medicare benefits or accept (tacitly) a measure of “redistribution,” compromise, and cutbacks: “Why cut Medicare benefits so we can give insurance to the uninsured? Why charge our elderly for the problem? This is entitlement redistribution. Pure Medicare doesn’t cover nearly enough of our medical expenses. When is AARP going to speak out and help protect Senior benefits?”13 This message embodied AARP’s worst nightmare: that significant numbers of the fifty-plus population perceived comprehensive health care reform as a zero-sum game, an “us-versus-them” battle that jeopardized an already underfunded Medicare system by redistributing resources to younger Americans, including (many suspected) illegal immigrants.
In the spring and early summer, AARP continued to champion its more general Divided We Fail agenda while avoiding explicit endorsement of emerging House and Senate health care reform bills. Initially, the organization tried to have it both ways. On the one hand, on its www.keepmedicarefair.org Web site, the organization prioritized stabilizing Medicare premium increases and adding services. But AARP also started a new Web site, HealthActionNow.org, inviting visitors to sign a petition urging swift congressional action, along with a blog to share personal stories illustrating problems with the current system.
The line between AARP’s coveted “nonpartisan” commercial trust brand and its advocacy “warrior” image dissolved as it became more entangled in defending Democrats’ reform proposals. Two developments proved especially troublesome.
First, in midsummer 2009 one of the major drafts of health care reform legislation, congressional health care reform bill H.R. 3200, contained a proposal to finance health care reform in part through more than five hundred billion dollars in reduced future spending on Medicare and Medicaid. This feature endured and became part of the final PPACA.
The proposed spending reduction immediately raised cries of rationing and redistribution and accusations that health care reform would be accomplished at the expense of older Americans. Talk of “death panels” began to surface, and the flow of angry e-mails to the AARP Web site became a torrent, with heated accusations that the organization was selling out its members—evidence of what a New York Times reporter termed a “senior mini-mutiny.”
Second, President Obama began invoking AARP’s name in promoting health care reform. Indeed, on July 28, 2009, President Obama and AARP visually merged. The president stood in front a large AARP logo for more than an hour during a Webcast “tele-townhall forum” in which Obama fielded health care reform questions from telephone callers and a small, live audience. Casual viewers of forum excerpts on the nightly newscasts or on the Web easily presumed that AARP “backed” the president with more than just their logo. Indeed, the president himself presumed as much two weeks later when he publicly declared: “We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors.” In the same setting he later denied Medicare cutbacks, saying, “AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?”14
The news media also fueled perceptions that AARP had endorsed the Democratic health care reform bills. For example, on July 26, 2009, New York Times editorial writers concluded a two-thousand-word lead editorial on health care reform by suggesting an implicit AARP endorsement: “The AARP, the main lobby for older Americans, has praised the emerging bills and thrown its weight behind the cause. All of this suggests to us that the great majority of Americans—those with insurance and those without—would benefit from health care reform.”15
AARP quickly issued an official denial of any such explicit endorsement. Yet on the same day as the official denial, AARP policy director John Rother blurred this denial somewhat when he responded to a question from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about opponents’ scare tactics. “We have read every page of the bills and we’ve concluded that the bills proposed in Congress would be good for seniors,” Rother assured viewers. “[There is] nothing to be scared about in the actual legislation.”16
AARP’s efforts to defend emerging health care reform proposals on its Web page continued to be met with member responses that were nearly always overwhelmingly negative:
The fact that AARP would support this program is ludicrous. This is not only a poor choice for the country, but it is a more serious concern for seniors. Who do you think government rationing will affect first and foremost? Of course the answer is seniors. Do the right thing rather than your typical left wing stance. Get the liberal blinders off and look at this for what it is. Continued failure to take a balanced approach to issues leaves me no choice to make the decision to not renew my membership.17
After 23 years I have just cancelled my membership in AARP. Does the management of AARP actually think they are providing a benefit or service to AARP members by conspiring with the Obama administration to finance the current healthcare debacle on the backs of senior citizens? Given the way the administration is handling this issue, it is impossible to know what in hell the law will be, or what effect it will have, except to decrease coverage for living seniors, and assist in accelerating their “end of life.” I’m waiting for some bright Washington “beanhead” to suggest that the problem can be resolved much more quickly (even before the end of Obama’s first term) and efficiently by simply getting rid of 40 million pesky senior citizens! After all, we and our crooked doctors are to blame. And just think of the jobs it would create in the funeral industry!18
AARP’s leaders quickly moved into damage control. CEO Barry Rand responded sharply to press reports that members of Congress were eyeing even larger Medicare cuts over the next decade than those originally proposed in the House bill, H.R. 3200. “AARP cannot support any efforts to target Medicare beneficiaries for increased cost-sharing or other benefit cuts,” warned Rand. Other national and regional officers went into action. A raking critique of AARP, “Obamacare Could Kill AARP,” by Mark Tapscott in WashingtonExaminer.com was answered there in a matter of hours by the AARP vice president, Drew Nannis, in “AARP: Setting the Record Straight.”19 Through press releases and on radio and television, AARP’s articulate policy director John Rother tried to clarify AARP positions and jousted in print and on talk shows with prominent critics of the proposals.20
During the August congressional recess, AARP tried to debunk health care reform “myths” mushrooming at local town hall meetings—including one raucous Dallas AARP forum where local AARP officials simply walked out. (A video of the meeting received wide viewing on YouTube.) A one-page document entitled “Myths vs. Facts” on the AARP Web site denied that health care reform would (1) be socialized medicine, (2) result in rationed care, (3) hurt Medicare, or (4) be too expensive. In fine print, there was an admission of improving Medicare’s quality and “eliminating billions in waste.”
AARP also launched a multi-million-dollar series of radio and television ads. Throughout the health care reform battles, it was actively lobbying Congress members and undoubtedly played a role in a forcing White House reversal of an early concession to the pharmaceutical lobby to continue the Bush-era ban on Medicare’s ability to bargain with drug companies over prices. Members of the AARP “Divided We Fail” initiative as well as those registered for AARP Grassroots America were regularly updated through e-mail messages—often containing links to congressional offices.
Most Americans simply did not share the urgency felt by AARP, Congress, and the White House. Nearly 80 percent did not believe that there was a crisis in U.S. health care, nor did they believe that benefits would accrue to them personally or reduce overall costs—according to a Gallup poll. Most favored some government involvement in health care, but fewer than half favored a government-run health care system.21 Debate over health care reform became so intense that thousands of e-mails overloaded the House of Representatives’ Web site.22
Nevertheless, into the late summer of 2009, senior citizens continued to assert that health care reform would come at their expense, a perception reinforced by the Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly. “From the raw numbers, it appears seniors are the net losers under bills approved by three House committees last week. . . . The legislation trims $563 billion out of Medicare’s growth rate over the next 10 years, while pumping in about $350 billion.”23
AARP and other health care reform supporters confronted an unwelcome and growing public opinion age split toward health care reform: generally, Americans over age fifty opposed it; those under fifty supported it.24 More specifically, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 29 percent of those over age sixty-five supported health care reform versus 44 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Forty-five percent of Older Boomers (aged fifty to sixty-four) favored the plan but only 34 percent of Younger Boomers and Generation X (aged thirty to forty-nine). A third of whites favored the plan, while half of blacks did. Thirty-five percent of those with incomes above $75,000 were favorably inclined versus 44 percent with incomes less than $30,000. The most decisive variable was political identification: 61 percent of Democrats were favorable versus 12 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of independents.25
A substantial number of the angry e-mails cascading onto the AARP Web site (and also the sites of the major news media) indicated that average citizens were much quicker than elites to detect a potential redistribution of health care services from older, largely white Americans to younger immigrant populations. Democrats and AARP found themselves trying to straddle the emerging age/class/ethnic triple divide discussed in previous chapters.
More than half of respondents to an August 2009 NBC News poll agreed that health care reform would ultimately give health care coverage to illegal immigrants.26 (But it took the Wall Street Journal nearly a month to offer a small front-page story entitled “Illegal Immigration Enters the Health-Care Debate.”27 A week later, the Los Angeles Times more directly confronted the topic in an editorial titled “Illegal Immigrants Debate Could Potentially Block Reform.”)28
Indeed, before and after the ultimate, narrow passage of the legislation, working- and middle-class whites over age fifty remained skeptical of health care and, increasingly, the rest of the Obama administration’s agenda. In October 2009 Ronald Brownstein, analyzing a National Journal/Heartland America poll, noticed that only 40 percent of whites supported health care reform compared to 75 percent of non-whites.29 Huffington Post political editor Thomas Edsall bitterly blamed a racial and demographic divide for almost dooming health care reform: “The harsh reality is many [white] voters consider the health care bill a multibillion-dollar transfer of taxpayer money to the uninsured, a population disproportionately, although by no means exclusively, made up of the poor, African Americans, Latinos, single parents and the long-term unemployed.”30
But older and many white Americans’ suspicions of this broad-scale social change were grounded in a measure of common sense. There was the inevitable realization that the inclusion of forty-seven million uninsured into a vast new system of health insurance and services while not increasing overall costs (keeping health care expenditures “revenue neutral”) would necessarily result in substantial changes. This meant some degree of rationing and redistribution of services away from those currently using a disproportionate share of health care costs and services: senior citizens, especially those in their last year of life. (And despite the jeers of pundits, many citizens correctly perceived that illegal immigrants—21 percent of the uninsured—would eventually gain access to the system, especially if the Obama White House made good on its public proclamations for immigration reform that would include a “pathway to citizenship.”)
These patterns of skepticism persisted after passage of health care reform. A Gallup poll found that only 20 percent of whites thought health care reform would benefit them, though a majority admitted that the enacted legislation would help uninsured and low-income families.31 A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama concurrently losing support among Americans making $50,000 to $75,000, “a predominantly white group over age 50 but not yet retired” (in other words, working-and middle-class Older Boomers).32 Indeed there was some indication that sentiments for repealing “ObamaCare” were rising, perhaps spurred by the controversy generated when Arizona enacted a new law to identify illegal immigrants in 2010. The pollster Peter Brown immediately recognized a familiar age-class-culture division: “Like Affirmative Action, Arizona Law Splits Elites and the Public.”33
As the last member of the U.S. House of Representatives to speak just before the climatic March 9, 2010, vote on the Senate version of what would become the PPACA, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi very publicly saluted AARP for its consistent support and specifically for its endorsement of “cracking down on fraud and waste in Medicare and strengthening Medicare for today’s seniors and future generations of seniors.” Indeed, Pelosi reportedly credited AARP and Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as the two primary organizational forces behind the bill. Yet despite such notable identification with a polarizing cause, AARP received little notice in the mainstream press—critical or otherwise.
In mid-October of 2009, the Christian Science Monitor quoted AARP executive vice president Nancy LeaMond that the intensifying health care reform battle had become something of a “roller derby.”34 A more critical Washington Post analysis in late October revisited the organization’s dual identity and potential conflict of interest as both “reform advocate and insurance salesman” and noted the high pay of AARP executives.35 A New York Times report suggested a generational battle and “mini-mutiny” within AARP over perceptions that the young (through mandatory insurance enrollment) and the old (through reductions in projected Medicare spending) were going to be sacrificed to obtain reduced insurance rates for the middle-aged.36
But AARP officials were getting comparatively good news on how their coveted “trust” image was faring. An AARP sample survey of its members that indicated that, indeed, when informed about congressional bills’ key provisions and AARP support, 39 percent “strongly supported” the plan and another 24 percent “somewhat supported” it. AARP was also gratified to discover that more than 80 percent of survey respondents indicated that they trusted AARP’s position on health care because “as a non-partisan organization AARP is an independent voice fighting for the best interest of people over 50.” These findings had been foreshadowed the previous month by a National Public Radio/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey. AARP was ranked first among seven health reform interest groups (by nearly a 20-point margin over second-place Consumers Union) by Democrats and Independents, who indicated confidence that AARP would “recommend the right thing for the country on health care.” (For Republicans, AARP tied with “health insurance companies.”)37
Fortified by these results, on December 19, 2009, Nancy LeaMond posted a letter to the AARP Web site that she had sent to all U.S. senators urging them to vote for cloture on the Senate’s PPACA. “Given the importance of bringing this debate to a close and securing timely Senate passage of health care legislation, AARP has designated the cloture motion . . . a key vote. As part of our ongoing effort to let our members know of action taken on key issues we will be informing them of how their Senators vote on this cloture motion.” Members enrolled in AARP’s Grassroots America campaign were updated on key votes and urged to contact their congressional representatives.
A mid-November Rasmussen telephone voter survey, however, found more mixed views of AARP. Fifty-three percent of all respondents had at least a somewhat favorable view of AARP—but nearly 40 percent had an unfavorable view. Eighty percent of Democrats had a favorable perception of AARP as opposed to 58 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of independents—but nearly 48 percent of the latter had a negative assessment. Ironically, the organization registered higher support with survey respondents under age thirty (60 percent) than those over age fifty (49 percent). When survey respondents were informed of AARP’s support of the Democratic health care plan, favorable opinion of AARP fell from 53 to 43 percent. The good news for AARP’s leaders was that Rasmussen survey respondents had a somewhat confused, nonpartisan perception of AARP’s politics: 38 percent thought AARP was generally supportive of Democrats, 8 percent thought it favored Republicans, 36 percent thought it was equally supportive of both parties, and 17 percent weren’t sure.38
These generally positive polling data sharply contrasted with escalating criticism of AARP in the blogosphere and in newspaper letters to the editor. Especially as AARP’s support of Democratic health reform initiatives became more widely known, almost all of the blogosphere political commentary waxed critical, often ending with a declaration of rejecting AARP literature or with a promise to tear up membership cards. (One blogger archly dubbed himself a member of the “New” AARP: Armed And Really Pissed.)39 Surging anti-AARP sentiment on the blogs and elsewhere registered with the burgeoning antigovernment Tea Party movement, which sponsored an AARP membership card–burning gathering in Washington, D.C., in early December.
In past, present, and future policy debates, AARP’s leaders must negotiate difficult and shifting policy terrain with other powerful players. In building coalitions, by and large, Bill Novelli’s AARP tried to maintain pragmatic, center-left positions. Divided We Fail was a pioneering coalition made up of the Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the SEIU. Eventually, however, this very loose coalition showed strains: In his own considerable efforts at promoting health care reform, SEIU’s savvy president Andy Stern rarely mentioned Divided We Fail or AARP; Stern and his union were more often identified with later alliances such as Better Health Care Together (with major corporate partners such as Walmart, General Mills, and AT&T) and with the Quality Care Coalition (which included the American Medical Association, Families USA, and the Federation of American Hospitals). The National Federation of Independent Businesses eventually urged its members to lobby Congress to vote against H.R. 3200.40 AARP was also a coalition partner in Healthy Economy Now with the pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA and the Federation of American Hospitals, but this coalition dissolved when the other partners moved on to form Americans for Stable Quality Care.41 On its own, however, AARP was successful in negotiating with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby for reduced drug prices for seniors in the Medicare “doughnut-hole” drug coverage gap.
On entitlement matters in general, AARP’s leaders have negotiated with powerful policy players on the political right and the left. They dealt with the George W. Bush White House for eight years and continue dialogues with entitlement “fiscal hawks” in foundations, think tanks, the press, and Congress. The new Peter G. Peterson Foundation—with chief spokesman David Walker, former Congressional Budget Office director—has had considerable media impact. (Walker was a guest speaker at AARP’s National Policy Agenda meetings in February 2008.)42 The Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson remains the foremost press critic of entitlement funding levels. Kent Conrad (D-SD) and Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), among fiscal centrists in the Senate, and “Blue Dog Democrats” in the House will likely shape entitlement change.43
On the political left, a phalanx of more liberal unions, civil rights groups, and other interest groups had hopes for greater empowerment from a Democratic Congress and White House. The Obama administration’s strong push for comprehensive health care reform heeded calls for more equitable universal health care by liberal groups such as the SEIU, the National Coalition for Healthcare Reform (led by the civil rights veteran Ralph Neas), and Families USA (helmed by its able lobbyist and founder Ron Pollack).44 And AARP is the mighty anchor for a loose alliance of sixty other senior citizen service and advocacy groups, the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations.
In the realm of age-based politics, AARP remains without competitors. The conservative American Seniors’ Association gained a few thousand AARP defectors during the health care reform battles, but it and other “conservative AARP alternatives” remain insignificant players. And instead of generational clashes with an Obama-energized youth movement, cooperation prevailed on health care reform between AARP and “Organizing for America,” a revived and retooled version of the Internet-based campaign organization that elected Obama—initially referred to as “Obama 2.0.” During the health care debates, Organizing for America sent messages to thirteen million e-mail addresses, four million cell phone contacts, and two million active volunteers. But its impact was negligible compared to the squads of angry senior citizens who turned out for August congressional town hall meetings.45 (These developments distressed New York Times star editorial doyen Maureen Dowd: “Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something. . . . Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming ‘Proud Member of the Mob.’ ”)46
More than a decade after our first conversation about boomers in late 1999, John Rother, AARP’s policy director and resident “boomer brain,” had moved up from a more modest lower-floor office in AARP’s massive headquarters building to a larger tenth-story office with an impressive view of the Capitol. He was generally pleased with the new PPACA and AARP’s major role in achieving the milestone legislation.47
But Rother was disappointed by older Americans’ sharply negative response to health care reform. AARP’s own membership surveys found a somewhat less divided fifty-plus population. But the volume and visibility of intense, angry response registered on AARP’s own Web page, elsewhere in the blogosphere, and in the contentious August town hall meetings was, Rother admitted, “extraordinary.”
Those over sixty-five were the most vehemently opposed. But Rother was especially vexed by the lack of support from the age fifty to sixty-four baby boomer demographic. They were among the primary beneficiaries of the reform legislation’s two major accomplishments: prohibiting the use of preexisting conditions to deny health insurance and setting limits on the use of age categories to determine insurance premiums.
Approximately four hundred thousand AARP members resigned in direct response to the organization’s support of PPACA; perhaps another half million did not renew because of it. Rother figured it would take about a year to rebound via new member registration. Significantly, the losses were greatest among older, higher-income white men, a core constituency of and driving force behind the Tea Party movement.
The emergence of the boomer-driven Tea Party movement surprised Rother and others at ARRP. He took this as evidence of a broader reactionary or conservative response among aging boomers. Their more youthful protests against the status quo were yielding to fear of change, a response more typical of older adults.
Yet Rother remained more convinced than ever of boomers’ basic ideological stability. “A generation’s circumstances may change, but not their underlying mind-set.” Aging boomers retained their characteristic individualism, desire for choices, and mistrust of government—the latter, perhaps, made even worse by the eight years of George W. Bush’s administration. Not even the stock market crash, recession, and layoffs had changed that. Boomers’ political potential has been lost—so far.
Nevertheless, Rother thought that many boomers were passing through a definitive life transition: the loss of their parents. Boomers increasingly must face the grim realization that they are the “older generation.” Though many must still support their grown children (to a greater degree than their parents supported them), many are considering one final act of individual action and defiance: “reinvention.” (AARP has taken note of this generational urge for a final metamorphosis via new television ads that teasingly begin: “When I grow up, I want to . . .”)48
A fifty-year-old AARP is facing similar questions of organizational identity. Through 2009, AARP stayed the course on its long-term, expansive “big picture” strategy charted by Bill Novelli. They pursued the goal of preserving Medicare through broader health care reform, accepting the need for “efficiency” and cost control measures. AARP’s leaders were probably correct in thinking that without overall health care reform Medicare would soon emerge as single, huge target for even more drastic cost cutting. Second, they were mindful that the organization could not win the membership and allegiance of future generations by ignoring the growing tax burdens imposed upon them by unreformed Medicare and Social Security systems. And, third, they realized that an inflexible defense of the entitlement status quo would reinforce AARP’s “greedy geezer” stereotype.
By vigorously exercising its “warrior brand” in support of Democratic health care reform proposals, AARP risked compromising its commercial, nonpartisan trust brand so vital in marketing its “member value” products and services and in expanding its membership base. But in terms of membership or image, the organization escaped with little damage. Indeed, the campaign for health care reform and other issues, in combination with the general transformation of AARP under Bill Novelli, may have done much to reduce its “greedy geezer” stereotype—at least among AARP members. In a 2010 survey on civic engagement, only 16.7 percent of AARP members indicated that they belonged to an “organization for older people.”49
AARP’s leaders and research staff seem genuinely committed to fulfilling their “power to make it better” slogan through fostering more expansive “positive social change.” They share the same general worries as America’s corporate, educational, and political leaders about the growing economic gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” across all generations. They are very much aware of the nation’s changing demographics and ethnic composition. AARP pulses with the educated, upper-middle-class faith of the best and the brightest that economic and social problems can be managed with proper information, feedback, and measurement “metrics.” They have been frustrated by the paralyzing political polarization in Washington, D.C., and the nation at large.
But the health care reform wars revealed within AARP two common sociological problems that tend to develop in large, established membership organizations. First, as the late Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic study Union Democracy demonstrated, leadership can become ideologically insulated, aloof, and detached from its members’ everyday concerns. Second, expanding, well-funded organizations may take on too many projects, resulting in loss of identity, loss of focus, and “mission drift.” (As mentioned in chapter 5, there was muttering within AARP that the organization was becoming so broad based that it might be renamed “the American Association of Persons.”)
Thus, while AARP’s leadership cadre became more expansive and ambitious in reforming society and in representing “everyone who has a birthday,” tens of thousands of its members felt that AARP had betrayed them by straying from what they considered its paramount political mission: protecting Medicare and Social Security. AARP’s members over age sixty-five did not like the new face of a “power-to-make-it better” social change organization that appealed to aging boomers’ 1960s social movement aspirations.50 And, as discussed above, AARP’s leaders were unprepared for the negative shift in senior sentiment toward comprehensive health care reform.
Ultimately, whether or not a significant number of AARP’s members disapprove of its “nonpartisan” partisan politics, ideology and culture, one must credit the organization and its leaders for exercising much-needed leadership and long-term vision on one of the most vexing public policy issues of the twenty-first century. Few others did so. Divided We Fail offered a blueprint for change, and its basic elements were incorporated into the most significant piece of reform legislation since Medicare.
Furthermore, through their grassroots activism, AARP fostered necessary political awareness, discussion, and action that are the essence of democratic process and very much in the Ethel Percy Andrus tradition of “promoting positive change.” AARP has become something of the “national forum” to discuss important issues that has been so longed for by the National Public Radio commentator Dick Meyer and many others. Though there may be an elite, left-leaning bias and though there may be some organizational financial interests at play, AARP’s officers, board members, and researchers seem to be able to focus upon the national interest in a more nonpartisan manner than most other powerhouse policy players. But in a rapidly changing nation, the question is whether devotion to their founder’s altruistic, happy mantra of “what we do, we do for all”—along with maintaining public trust in their products and financial services—ultimately compromises their “warrior brand” mission to advocate aggressively for older Americans’ specific interests in possible opposition to the needs and desires of younger and middle-aged generations.
The Great Recession and the new era of limits have taken a toll on AARP’s ambitions. In 2009, AARP suffered its worst financial setback in history, which resulted in layoffs of 10 percent of its staff and cutbacks in all major programs. (The organization advocating for careful retirement planning braved a measure of public ridicule by temporarily suspending its contributions to employee retirement accounts.)
Bill Novelli’s ambitious global and multigenerational agendas have been scaled back. The new president, Barry Rand, reportedly wants the organization to become more focused and “member driven” and to try to create a “sense of community” for fifty-plus Americans. AARP’s career fairs have drawn overflow crowds, and its massive Web page has been redesigned once again. A new “director of creative initiatives” has been hired.
AARP has expended much time and energy explaining and defending the new PPACA. These efforts will need to be redoubled in the wake of 2010 Republican congressional victories.
The ballooning national debt and sluggish economy now appear to be the crises so many experts deemed necessary to even consider serious entitlement reforms. Hence, AARP’s “ultimate battle” is coming much closer: defending Medicare and Social Security through politically shaping policy changes.
Indeed, in December 2010, AARP had to confront a serious new salvo of entitlement reductions proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The eighteen-member bipartisan panel had been appointed by President Obama and was cochaired by Erskine Bowles, former Clinton White House chief of staff, and by AARP’s resolute Republican foe, the former U.S. Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson. A majority of the members approved the final report but it failed to attain the full endorsement of fourteen members—a required threshold for Congressional consideration of its recommendations. Yet the panel’s package of tax reforms and entitlement reductions was surprisingly well received by pundits, politicians, and President Obama. But on AARP’s web page, John Rother responded sharply to the commission’s proposed changes in Social Security and Medicare. “The impact is troubling,” Rother warned. The commission’s proposals “would lower the retirement incomes of average people who rely on Social Security while significantly increasing their out of pocket costs for Medicare.” In the January/February issue of the AARP Bulletin, CEO A. Barry Rand rattled his “warrior brand” sword, labeling the proposals as a “call to action for AARP. We’re fighting to protect the retirement security of American families and future generations.”
But whether aging boomers will follow AARP into battle remains an open question.