I re-read Krugman's piece comparing the healthcare plans. (Feb 5th IIRC) Krugman is very emphatic about it. He won't predict what the chances of getting Hillary's plan is. But he very firmly believes that if Obama is elected president, we will NOT get universal healthcare. The lack of mandates means far lower enrollment which means far higher per-individual costs. It simply can't work. And now that Obama has gone so far out on a limb criticizing mandates he can hardly come back.
Healhcare reform may not happen anyway, but it just seems to me that Obama's platform is generally to the right of Clinton's. Big arguments on the other side have been promised here but not really delivered. We've been stuck arguing over rhetoric such as what is being "left on the table" which are pretty weak. The healthcare proposal difference is big and concrete.
Up and down the line, Krugman, who I greatly respect, has given arguments that fall almost entirely on Hillary's side.
A neighbor of mine sent me a link to the Atlantic Monthly piece by Andrew Sullivan piece praising Obama for his "end of partisanship" vision. OK, that clinched it for Clinton as far as I'm concerned. I want someone who will (or at least can) put up a fight, a street fighter, not a charismatic golden one who is always rising above it all, and might well fold in the first gentle breeze. This neighbor is someone up to their elbows in progressive politics, and yet still doesn't see through this crap, and apparently has not looked up Andrew Sullivan either.
This is a tough world, Republicans are tough for sure, despite their occasional rhetoric about "compassion". We need someone tough simply to hold the line, or keep it from getting pushed back far further.
My political scientist friend is firmly on Clinton's side. He said charisma doesn't work in the Presidency. You need someone tough and experienced, he says. He adds that JFK got none of his legislative agenda accomplished, and would probably have lost in 1964 and gone down as one of the worst Presidents if he hadn't been assasinated. He came out to Texas on a fence-mending mission because nearly everyone in the state hated him. (I lived in California at the time and was too little to know anything. After he died I thought he must have been the Son of God.)
I've also thought a lot about voting for Edwards, still on the ballot (he only stopped "campaigning").. But a vote like that hardly counts. How much airtime is given to the Edwards votes now? Zero. It's the unfortunate nature of winner-take-all systems, and particularly of our Presidential type (not parliamentary) that it always comes down to two choices. Anything else doesn't really count. When I voted Socialist in 1996, for an "official write-in candidate", legally required to be counted, I couldn't even find the number of votes in Texas recorded anywhere.
So of course it's "lesser evilism", but isn't that yet another word for Democracy?
And I'm just afraid right now that Barack Obama is the greater evil of the two, as well as the least capable of resisting even greater evil. I tried to imagine myself voting for the "end of partisan politics" candidate in the primary, and I just couldn't.
I tried to see Hillary at a rally in San Antonio Wednesday, at St. Mary's University. First I spent 45 minutes in a traffic jam trying to find parking on campus, then ended up going way off campus to find parking. Then the line, 3 to 5 persons wide, was more than a half mile long. One person said she should have held it in the local sports arena. I had been afraid after all her recent losses, nobody would show up. But Hillary has been winning the biggest states, California and New York. And she could win Texas. I needed to go back to work.
Charles Peterson
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