Software Review
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05 Mar 07 Arik Johnson |  |
Drafting Ron Wyden as VP: Why Solving the Healthcare Crisis Should be the Defining Issue of the 2008 Presidential Race
After reading Jacob Weisberg's Slate.com piece on Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden's plan to solve the healthcare crisis in the U.S., I've decided we should draft him to run for President... or at least, Vice President. And I'm a Republican. But as a critic of Hillary's last go-round with that issue, he'd make a better running mate for someone like Edwards or Obama (or better yet, teaming with McCain or Romney for a potent [though unlikely] mixed ticket). The excerpt below tells you why:
Wyden is a politically savvy wonk, who in drafting the bill he recently introduced has tried to learn from previous Democratic mistakes. He recently told me he had read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times. (Apparently, Starbucks now offers an intravenous drip.)
Wyden's bill is 166 pages against Hillary's 1364, and he thinks he can pare it further. When he was getting started, Wyden drew a grid of the major interest groups and made sure there were plusses as well as minuses for each in his bill. He has support from CEOs, labor leaders, and even one maverick health-insurance executive.
And instead of trying to flatten the opposition, as the Clintons did in 1994, Wyden is courting Republicans. He recently got five of the most conservative men in the Senate to join him and four other Democrats as co-signers of a letter to Bush responding to the White House proposal. The letter endorses the principles of universal coverage and cost containment, and proposes that they all work together on a compromise
Under Wyden's plan, employers would no longer provide health coverage, as they have since World War II. Instead, they'd convert the current cost of coverage into additional salary for employees. Individuals would use this money to buy insurance, which they would be required to have.
Private insurance plans would compete on features and price but would have to offer benefits at least equivalent to the Blue Cross "standard" option. Signing up for insurance would be as easy as ticking off a box on your tax return. In most cases, insurance premiums would be withheld from paychecks, as they are now.
Eliminating employers as an additional payer would encourage consumers to use health care more efficiently. Getting rid of the employer tax deduction, which costs a whopping $200 billion a year, would free up funds to subsidize insurance up to 400 percent of the poverty line, which is $82,000 for a family of four. The Lewin Group, an independent consulting firm, has estimated that Wyden's plan would reduce overall national spending on health care by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years and that it would save the government money through great administrative efficiency and competition.
Can Wyden and his allies market this kind of bill as an advance for competition and choice, which it is? Or will opponents succeed in framing it negatively, as they did the Clinton bill in 1994, as an expansion in the scope of governmentwhich is also an accurate description? Will moderate Republicans see their advantage in sharing credit for fixing the system or in denying an accomplishment to Democrats, as they did last time?
To design a system that covers the uninsured, removes the medical burden from employers, lowers government costs, and even slightly reduces what the average family spends is no mean feat. But Ron Wyden may soon discover that coming up with the smartest health-care plan we've seen yet was the easy part of the job.
Hillary Rodham Clinton | Rudolph Giuliani |
John Edwards | John McCain |
Barack Obama | Mitt Romney |
Iowa, Now More Than Ever: "Emailer X" sends a majestically symmetrical analysis with a grim corn-fed conclusion. [Boldface added]:
There are a couple of anomalies regarding 2008. First, it's the first genuinely open seat race in a very long time. There is no incumbent president or designated incumbent (Nixon, HHH, GFord, GHWB, Gore) running for either party's nomination. Thus the networks (which always overspend their primary coverage budgets in single party presidential nomination fights) are going to be financially strapped to cover two party presidential nomination fights at the same time.
Media coverage is the oxygen of politics; candidates who get media coverage can continue to raise money and candidates who don't get coverage can't. ... [snip]
Because the news divisions are less and less profitable (and "news gathering" is increasingly expensive), the bias of the television media in 2008 will be to shut off as much oxygen to as many candidates as possible as soon as possible. To save money. Which is one reason we have the current coverage configuration, which implicitly states that (1) Clinton and Obama are the front-runners on the Democratic side, with Edwards as the wild-card position player (in Iowa) and (2) McCain and Giuliani are the front-runners on the Republican side, with Romney as the wild-card position player (he's presumed to have a "base" in NH because of its proximity to MA, and he's raised a ton of dough). Everyone else gets the multi-candidate forum coverage package and that's it. If they want day-to-day coverage, they can go generate local coverage. They're not in the national coverage budget.
Given this configuration, the name of the game for the front-runners is "shut off all the oxygen to everyone else early." Which, translated, means: win Iowa and New Hampshire, and the game is over.
It seems to me that the only person who truly understands this is John Edwards. The others act like Iowa is a bother and that New Hampshire, while important, is not nearly as important as it used to be. California may move to early March! It's all about the Super Tuesdays! But here's the thing: If McCain or Clinton come into a Super Tuesday having lost Iowa and New Hampshire, then they're basically cooked. They've lost the "I & E;" inevitability and electability. And neither party's base much likes them anyway. It hardly follows that they will like them more after they've run losing campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire.
I don't have the schedules handy, but I think Hillary has been to Iowa twice in the last four years. That's just stupid. I don't think Obama has traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire more than 3 times each. That's dumb. McCain (whom Iowa GOPers still distrust because he blew them off in 2000) hasn't spent much time in Iowa, nor has Giuliani. That's dumb. Romney seems to think that Michigan is every bit as important as Iowa. That's dumb. Only Edwards has basically moved to Iowa and declared a second residence in New Hampshire.
As you know, the entire media infrastructure basically moves to Des Moines for the last 10 days of the Iowa caucuses (which are usually on a Monday night). This year, they'll send a B-team to cover the Las Vegas primary, but that will be a drive-by deal. The machine will move to Manchester New Hampshire and megaphone from there. After that, it's off to South Carolina for that Saturday primary. Then it's imperative that one nomination fight be declared over and that the other be brought to a quick conclusion.
The other anomaly is that neither party's base (really) has a candidate. Hillary has the Clinton wing of the party, but the influence of the Clintons has diminished with the rise of Internet-based fund-raising on the left. The Netroots can match any money machine dollar for dollar. And unlike the Fat Cat Network, the Netroots bring hundreds of thousands of voters to the table as well. But the Netroots don't have a candidate (their candidate is Gore, but he's not running, apparently). Likewise on the GOP side, the base's candidate (Jeb Bush) is not running.
Because Republicans are concerned about losing both control of the legislative branch (2006) and the executive (2008?), the base has decided to be pragmatic. Find me a winner and we'll back him. Because Democrats need to retain control of the legislative branch and believe that they have their best shot since 1992 at picking up the executive, the Netroots are being as pragmatic as the GOP base. So the "aura" if inevitability and electability keeps everyone in their places. Lose that aura and you're done. The front-runners (all of them) can lose that aura completely in Iowa and New Hampshire. And if they do, there's nothing to fall back on, the base will cut them loose in a heartbeat.
This is why the Geffen thing was so injurious to Clinton's campaign. It fractured the aura a bit (confirmed by the Clinton campaign's over-wrought response). ...
It's a weird thing to watch all this unfold. And a weird thing to find yourself viewing John Edwards as the only one who gets the game.
Reaction: OK, there are two big trends here--1) The addition of more early primary states (Nevada, maybe California) and 2) the Decline of the MSM (and their budgets). "X" argues both have 100% perverse consequences: 1) Iowa and New Hampshire are now more crucial than ever and 2) the MSM news budget will completely drive the campaign, starving laggards of oxygen to force a swift conclusion. ... I can see Perverse Consequence #1--if Iowa and New Hampshire were in January but all the other states moved their primaries back to May, then (as X emails) "You could actually skip IA and NH and still win the nomination!" But I don't see Perverse Consequence #2--how does the decline of the MSM, and the rise of New Media, mean that the MSM's "coverage budget" drives the campaign more than ever, starving those candidates it ignores of oxygen? Surely it should be easier now for a non-frontrunning candidate denied MSM "oxygen"--Richardson, say--to get some "oxygen" outside the MSM (through a vigorous Web campaign that raises money for paid media, or a reverse-macaca YouTube moment) in a way that attracts voters in one of the primaries and gets the candidate back on the MSM's menu? ... 3:16 P.M. link
Is the "conversation" on Hillary's website as sanitized, repressed and otherwise controlled as ....well, as you'd expect Hillary's website to be? This blogger claims his non-vituperative critical comment about energy policy was censored. He's a "neophyte" blogger, which raises suspicions that he's a plant from some other campaign--but if he is he does a good job of faking the geniuine bloggers' solipsistic drone. You make the call.
