>The focus on health care is looking like one of the great political
>blunders of all time. Again, I don't mean that in some grand
>ideological sense, as if Obama & Co. were real social dems. I mean it
>in terms of partisan success on their own terms.
Which brings up a question I've had for a little while? Why exactly the focus on health care reform as big policy initiative? Since Massachusetts, there's been a little rumbling in the Dems about taking a more piecemeal approach to health reform. Why didn't they do that in the first place? I realize that even piecemeal, health reform could still turn out to be a big giveaway to insurance companies, but just in terms of Democratic strategy, they've always had a big enthusiasm for Health. Care. Reform. as a major policy program and it's been a failure. They could have just done something like extending Medicare to people 55 and over (whether or not the Dems really want to do that is a different story) which probably would have been difficult in its own right, but it seems do-able and may have gotten us a bit closer to a single-payer system. But instead, they spent so much time and political capital on a major overhall that was in many ways repulsive, and probably won't get passed anyway. I just don't understand why. -- James Patrick Leveque MSc Student in Comparative & General Literature School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures University of Edinburgh