¹⁴Dole's comment about the media "buying the spin" Democrats put on the nursing home issue may also have reflected the unhappiness of a politician who has had an issue redefined out from under him. Part of the problem was that the Republican leadership, having heard only from governors and the nursing home industry prior to the formulation of their Medicaid and nursing home proposals, was literally unaware of some of the context in which they were operating. That fact was borne out the following year when Sen. Trent Lott (R., MS), who succeeded Dole as majority leader, met with the CMS administrator and deputy administrator (both of whom had been on the IOM committee and had been active in the anti-repeal efforts in 1995). At that meeting, Lott cited the MDS, about which a constituent had complained to him, as a prototypical example of excess government paperwork and bureaucracy. He clearly had no concept that this was the very issue over which he and his colleagues had taken such a political beating just a year earlier.[Return to Text]