Tag: presidential election

Obama’s unhealthy choice


Ezra Klein hits the Obama campaign for a short-sighted attack on the Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal. The campaign is sending out a mailer (above) that, as Klein points out, is remarkably similar to the Harry and Louise ad (below — both images are from Klein’s blog) the insurance industry ran in the early 1990s to squash what Hillary Clinton’s task force was proposing.


Here’s what Klein has to say:

The Obama campaign kept their hairstyles and barely even changed their clothing — which is really quite unfair to Harry and Louise, who probably let go of the plaid years back. What’s worse is that the argument they’re making is applicable to any kind of universal health care arrangement, including the arrangements Obama himself will eventually have to adopt:

An “automatic sign-up,” a la Medicare, would still force Americans into health care they may not want to pay for, or may feel overburdened by. Some seniors feel overburdened by Medicare’s cost-sharing now. Meanwhile, Obama not only has a mandate for kids in his own health care plan — what if the parents can’t pay, one might ask? — but he said, in last night’s debate, “If people are gaming the system, there are ways we can address that. By, for example, making them pay some of the back premiums for not having gotten it in the first place.” That, of course, is exactly what a mandate does. Gaming the system, in this context, means not purchasing health care. And Obama is now threatening to force them to pay back premiums. That’s a harsher penalty than anything Clinton has proposed.

The key, as he points out in another post on the Urban Institute’s report on health care mandates, is that you can’t achieve universal coverage without some form of mandate. Otherwise, you create a tiered system with the poor being served by Medicaid, the rich buying their own Cadillac care and the rest left to fend for themselves without any recourse.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Hey, Rudy: Don’t let the doorhit you on the way out

This post from Josh Marshall gets at something I’ve always believed about Rudy Giuliani, that he rarely has been willing to engage in a fight that he didn’t think he could win. Or, more to the point, Giuliani is the classic bully, taking on those weaker than him but rarely engaging in those who are his equals or, god forbid, stronger than him.

So, now we won’t have Rudy and hist autocrtic, bullying ways, to kick around any longer. And the republic can breath a sigh of relief.

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The Edwards effect

John Edwards — who announced today that he is leaving the race — has had a far greater impact on this year’s presidential race than the number of delegates he’s claimed might indicate.

Forget what the talking heads will tell you, Edwards was the guy who drove the edebate on the Democratic side, forcing the issues of class, poverty and economic inequity onto the table well before the nation began its slide into recession.

Edwards’ constant focus on the “two Americas” message and his willingness to admit his mistake in voting for the Iraq war helped pull the debate during the Democratic primary to the left and his early unveiling of healthcare and stimulus plans forced his rivals to do the same.

In the short term, it would appear that Barack Obama would be the natural beneficiary of Edwards’ decision. Dan Balz writes in The Trail blog on The Washington Post Web site that

Edwards appears to have little affection for Hillary Clinton. That has been obvious in most debates, but particularly beginning in Chicago last August at the YearlyKos convention. There he drew a bright line of distinction by challenging her to join him and Barack Obama in rejecting contributions from Washington lobbyists. When she declined and defended those lobbyists, he had an issue that he never relinquished.

Edwards ran a crusade against Washington special interests and the political culture that has created such a cozy relationship between money and power. Clinton, he argued, symbolizes that relationship. She was, in his line of argument, a member in good standing of the status quo politics that he said desperately needed changing.

In debate after debate, he led or helped carry the fight to Clinton. A natural debater from his days as a trial lawyer, Edwards enjoyed the prime-time combat of their joint encounters — in a way that Obama never seemed to. The record is replete with quotations from Edwards denouncing Clinton’s brand of politics. An endorsement of her would produce the most awkward press conference since John McCain grudgingly gave his support to George W. Bush in the spring of 2000.

Everything about Edwards’s message suggests he and Obama are natural allies. As Edwards said in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses and in the memorable debate in New Hampshire three days before that state’s primary, voters want change and two candidates in the Democratic race offered it — albeit with very different styles.

There are no guarantees, of course. Some of the polling suggests that Edwards’ supporters — especially white Southerners — may be reluctant to back Obama.

That would be a shame, and not because I’m likely to vote for Obama come Tuesday (despite my disagreements with his decision to frame some issues using conservative language). Race should not be a factor in anyone’s decision.

Identity politics too often leads people to vote against their interests. There is nothing inherently progressive about a woman or black candidate (think Eliazbeth Dole and Alan Keyes) or inherently conservative about white Southerners (John Edwards and Al Gore are the proof).

As I write in the Dispatches column that will run tomorrow, we need to focus on the issues that are important. The question for progressives is which of the remaining candidates is most likely to offer progressives solutions to the problems that plague us — and not just on the economy, but on the war in Iraq, the more general war on terror, on foreign policy, climate change, the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, and so on.

The goal has to be to move the country in a more progressive direction, reversing years of conservative Republican rule.

As for John Edwards, my hope is that he continues to press on, that he keeps his promise to continue fighting to bridge the gap between rich and poor that is spliting this country apart.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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