Prairie Weather

Sudden interest

Over the past several days, the T.R. Reid interview at "The Scribe" has been getting a lot of hits.  I take this as a good sign since TRR is articulate, clear, and persuasive* when talking about the need for health care reform.  Scroll down the right column here to "The Scribe" →  and you'll find link to "How to win over the right and get 'better, cheaper, and fairer health care'" right at the top.

*and funny

Did what happened in Connecticut doom real health care reform?

It comes down to the Ned Lamont race in '06 and the Democrats' big, big mistake. 

Damon, a libertarian in North Carolina nailed it this morning when he called in to the Diane Rehm show where E.J. Dionne and others were analyzing whether, given the loss of Ted Kennedy, health care reform stands a chance.

Damon:  As a libertarian I never thought I'd say this.  E. J. Dionne has been right all along.  Everything he's said I'd agree with [laughter].  What the Democrats should have done... Here's the Democrats problem, and that is in 2006 when Joe Lieberman was running for the Senate again and lost to Ned Lamont in the primary, the Democrat party establishment did not enforce any party discipline.  And that told people like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson that they too could violate party discipline and nothing would happen to them.  So the problem isn't that the Democrats lack 60 votes now that Ted Kennedy is dead.  The problem is that the 57th,58th, 59th votes are all very conservative Democrats who don't fear Barack Obama or Harry Reid.  I'd like E.J. to comment that, if he would.

E.J.:  This is when you trot out the old Will Rogers line, "I don't belong to an organized political party; I am a Democrat."  When you look at a party with a majority -- the Republicans, when they had a majority in the House -- actually had a lot of moderate members.  They lost their majority in part because all these moderates lost their seats.  There's not a single Republican left in the house from New England.  Similarly, the Democrats built this big majority by winning in places where you wouldn't necessarily expect a Democrat to win -- such as Nebraska.  I agree that you need more discipline in the party.  And I actually think -- on health care -- at the end you're going to get more of it than anyone is predicting now.  Every Democrat still remembers -- even people who weren't in office then -- what happened in 1994 when Bill Clinton couldn't get a health care bill through.  Democrats looked like they could not govern. And I think at the left end of the party and the right end of the party, people are going to look at each other and say, "We cannot fail again."  I think discipline will be kind of self-enforced because they can't afford to lose this.

Much as I like and admire E.J. Dionne, I hope he's wrong if what he means is that we get a substance-free Miracle Whip public option instead of the real thing.  And I think Damon has put his finger on the moment when (I think a lot of us sensed this) the Democratic party lost a lot of respect -- and self-respect.  Joe Lieberman is a constant reminder that Senate Democrats, for years, have failed to do what needs to be done.

Latest from the right

Rightwing radio down here in south Texas seems to be in a kind of crotch-clutching tizzy this morning.  It's all about mention of  Ted Kennedy in a KGB memo, declassified in 1991,  from the then KGB head to then Communist Party general secretary Andropov.  Apparently Kennedy's law school roommate had been in Moscow in the early '80's and proposed a way in which the Soviet Union could help the Democratic Party get rid of Reagan in the 1984 election.    Got all that? 

I like the idea of Republicans fondly pressing KGB internal memos to their quivering breasts. 

Bringing down Beck

Media Matters has a list -- really a quote from the LA Times -- showing that Glenn Beck had only a few sponsors left last week.  Want to write a letter, make a phone call, take a hard look at the business practices of these advertisers?  Knocking the rest of Beck's support out from under him could make a big difference in the civility of political debate.

On Wednesday, the only big companies with a presence during his show were Bank of America and the Wall Street Journal, whose parent company News Corp. also owns Fox News. The rest of the commercials included spots for gold seller Rosland Capital; Ashley Furniture Home Store; Empire Carpet; Liberty Medical, a diabetes medical supplier; Johnson Law Group, an asbestos litigation firm; “Shadow Government,” a new book critical of Obama published by the National Republican Trust; and the anti-tax group TeaPartyExpress.org.

Still yellow

If you've been web-co-dependent as long as I have (1982, before it was the web, before Windows), you will be glad to know that one of the first and most interesting bloggers, Heather Anne Halpert of "Lemon Yellow", is back -- only now she's "Blurry Yellow."

Why we know it in our gut

Why (I've been asking myself) am I investing so much time and energy in supporting health care reform when I'm already on the best policy America has to offer?  It seems so obvious to us on our side of the argument:  we just plain need universal health care in this country.  No one's healthy unless we're all healthy. That's a perfectly respectable spiritual as well as intellectual concept.  But the right, the side which lays claim to "spiritual values," is once again shown to be empty and destructive. 

Listening to Nandan Nilekani convinces me that those of us who are fighting for health care reform know instinctively -- in our gut as well as intellectually  -- that America is on a slippery slope.  That slope is greased by more than an iffy economy or (say) swine flu. 

Nilekani is one of the most important people in India.  He founded the successful company, Infosys, and has become involved in charting India's economic and social future.  You can hear him talk and at the same place read a transcript of his belief that India will profit from a huge "demographic dividend" which will go a long way towards making that country a powerful and competitive nation.  He's pretty clear about what makes a nation powerful.

As healthcare improves, as infant mortality goes down, fertility rates start dropping. And India is experiencing that. India is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years. What is unique about this demographic dividend is that India will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend. In other words, it will be the only young country in an aging world. And this is very important. At the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in India there are actually two demographic curves. One is in the south and in the west of India, which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015 because in that part of the country, the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a West-European country. Then there is the whole northern India, which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend. But a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night --  only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend.

Well, we still have the lights to study at night, but we're falling down badly on everything else -- most noticeably our "human capital" and the health care it receives doesn't receive.  Oh, and I don't think many Americans "study at night," do you?  When "study at night" is replaced by emailing what Glenn Beck had to say during the day, I think we're in real trouble. 

Nilekani cites another factor in India's upsurge:  democracy.

And finally, India has had the deepening of its democracy. When democracy came to India 60 years back it was an elite concept. It was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth. But today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice, the benefits of being in an open society. And therefore democracy has become embedded.

Improving health care for all and a vibrant, deepening democracy.  Aren't those exactly the elements in American life which have gone missing?