Bill Clinton? Are you crazy?

Normally I agree about 101% with Hendrik Hertzberg's political commentary.  Not this time.  Not the idea that Obama should send Bill Clinton in to save his bacon.

Over at her Daily Beast, our former editor Tina Brown has a very good suggestion for President Obama: unleash Bill Clinton to sweet-talk and arm-wrestle the Blue Dogs into dropping their obstruction of health-care reform.

And I don't think Rahm Emanuel is the whole reason for Howard Dean's exile.  Otherwise, Hertzberg gets the Dean problem right.

... Why is Dr. Howard Dean, perhaps the country’s most persuasive and knowledgeable advocate of health-care reform, not in the Administration? He is doing his best to campaign for reform as a private citizen, but shouldn’t he be doing it in an official capacity? Might this anomaly have something to do with the fact that Rahm Emanuel didn’t like the “fifty-state strategy” that Dean pursued (with great success, by the way) when he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee? ...

I heard Dean talking about the healthcare situation yesterday.  It was great to hear that clear, informed, sensible man again.  If only.

When Obama announced Rahm Emanuel would be his chief of staff, I felt a cold chill of dismay though I remember also thinking that, well, Emanuel is effective.  In an excess of optimism, I wrote on November 7, '08  that by the end of spring '09, the Obama administration "should have plenty to be proud of." 

Not so much, in retrospect.  I'm back to the cold chill of dismay -- it seems to be a permanent condition, and certainly a continuation of what many of us felt all during the Bush era.

Meanwhile, that McAllen, TX, hospital which was dissected in Atul Gawande's New Yorker article -- and which has become a popular symbol of greedy, costly healthcare -- is  pressuring Congress to insulate doctor-owned hospitals from reform.  The Texas border docs are fighting back against the reform movement with substantial contributions to Democrats and their opposition. 

The beat goes on.