kausfiles Pivots and Recaptures Its Message of Change!

kausfiles Pivots and Recaptures Its Message of Change!

kausfiles Pivots and Recaptures Its Message of Change!

A mostly political weblog.
Jan. 26 2010 9:04 PM

kausfiles Pivots and Recaptures Its Message of Change!

Here's your mystery "celebrity " entering the California governor's race. Yes I was hoping for someone more ... celebritous. This guy's mainly famous for being married to someone who's famous for being famous, right? ...

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John Ellis argues that Obama's job , governing in circumstances not of his choosing, isn't to pass health care reform or cap and trade but to:

get the country on a path to fiscal sustainability and to defeat (as much as humanly possible) those who seek to put nuclear weapons in our cities and detonate them in time for the evening news. His job, more accurately, is to cut costs, delay benefits, right-size government programs , rethink military and diplomatic strategies, re-focus our war efforts, all while rebuilding (or expanding) intellectual and physical infrastructure for the years ahead. And he must do all this while devising new strategies for jump-starting wealth creation. [E.A.]

That makes a lot of sense, except that establishing a guarantee of affordable health care is one of the things that would enable painful cuts in both the public and the private sector. If you know your health care is taken care of, then a cut in your projected pension becomes less threatening. It's less of a big deal to be downsized or outsourced, to give up your Detroit assembly line job (or D.C. newspaper job) and move to find work at some other company with a future. It's just money, then, not life or death. .And it's easier to jump at risks when there's a secure platform underneath you. ... P.S.: Tom Schaller of 538 thinks this sort of health care = flexibility argument  should have been the basis of Obama's sales pitch

Meanwhile, there should have been a rollout explaining that reform was not only good for corporate employers and thus American productivity, but also for worker and workplace performance and, thus again, American productivity. He should [frame] reform in those terms--rather than as a series of vignettes, true and as sad as they may be, about people with dropped coverage or bankrupting bills--and then publicly dared Republicans and their tea-partying conservative allies to vote against a bill that would make the American economy and the workers who fuel it more effective, more efficient, more productive and more competitive because we would no longer lose time and money and paperwork and missed work days to a cobbled-together health care system