When politicians or public officials leave office, it’s customary to hit the paid speakers circuit, where they join journalists and pundits in putting on special, personalized Sunday show-style discussions for corporations and their lobbying groups.
The lucky speakers and panelists get paid tens and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars to briefly entertain powerful corporate executives, whose jobs involve influencing policy so that it serves their own financial interests, at the expense of everyone else.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s six-figure speaking gigs with big banks and Wall Street firms were major 2016 campaign fodder, but lots of Washington insiders end up doing this — from Barack Obama and George W. Bush, to faux-populist conservative Tucker Carlson, and even famed Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward. For the most part, no one cares about all this “buckraking.”
It’s easy to dismiss these speeches as trivial, given the content — speakers typically provide canned commentary, rehash their accomplishments, and recount details from their books on sale. If you listen closely, though, you can occasionally hear something incredibly revealing.
By that measure, Anthony Fauci’s recent speech to Washington’s top health insurance lobbying group takes the cake. What was and wasn’t said spoke volumes about why buckraking is such an inherently gross practice — laying bare the problems with the country’s health care system and those charged with regulating it.
