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THE CONSENSUS CANDIDATE. A month or so ago, I talked about the odd dissonance of watching Barack Obama speak. "In possibly the most telling section," I wrote, "he gives a great riff on health care, which manages to totally inspire while not actually saying anything sweeping or controversial. Watching it, you'd swear he just promised the stars, the sky, and universal insurance, when he really just committed to electronic records." Today, Kevin notices the same thing.
After declaring in no uncertain terms that "affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how," we get a few lines about better use of technology, some tsk-tsking about insurance industry profits, and a bit of musing about whether employer-based healthcare is still the best idea out there. That's....not very bold.This is my long-standing concern with Obama: That he's trapped by his own popularity. The actual dynamic in play , after all, is fairly odd. Obama's themes are more liberal than his policy. You might expect lefty proposals snuck in beneath the cover of moderate rhetoric, but that's not the strategy here. So some use this as evidence that his instincts are progressive, and observers need merely give him time.Viewed more cynically, this is consensus-driven rhetoric. As folks involved in health policy well know, universal health care as an abstraction polls through the roof. Actual plans, policies, and specifics tend to meet with more resistance. Mirroring that relationship, Obama is advocating universal health care the idea while mentioning nothing but high-polling, broadly-agreed miscellanea. That's not to say that he couldn't step forward tomorrow morning with a brilliant, bold idea for moving this debate forward. But he's not there yet, and he is, contrary to what some protest, offering policy ideas. His specifics are electronic records, health care for kids, and more discussion. No one will disagree with those policies, but then, there's a reason for that. --Ezra Klein
