My latest article has caused David Sirota to completely lose his mind.
Question: Do you think Sirota actually formulates his DC-bashing ("only the Beltway's Wise Old Men, Serious Policy Experts, Self-Described Political Gurus and Universe-Rescuing Pundit Superheroes," etc) anew with each and every post he writes? Or has he created some sort of awesome Sirotabot program that does the work automatically? I'm sort of leaning towards the latter. After all, Sirota is a fairly smart guy, and clearly a helluva computer programmer, and I'm sure if he'd actually written this post, then somewhere between "only inside I-495 where theses Gods of Mt. Olympus frolick (sic)" and "folks are either too obsessed with the the pseudo-celebrity fanfare of being able to meet a U.S. Senator" he'd have managed to actually deal with one, or even half of one, of the article's points. Hopefully, a "substantive response" option will be included in Sirotabot 2.0.
For a somewhat more interesting reply, Nathan Newman takes on my arguments here. Well, sort of. Nathan argues that universal health care is more politically possible at the state level, which I fully agree with, and the article grants. His conclusion that "any reasonable analyst has to admit that serious health care reform is far closer in the states than at the federal level" sounds a lot like my article's basis, which is that states have repeatedly passed universal health care plans even as the federal government repeatedly failed.
It just doesn't take the next step, which is to admit that the states have, over and over again, proven incapable of sustaining these plans. I'd love to hear Nathan, or David, or someone explain how this next crop of reform attempts will avoid the fate of every other attempt, which was to fall apart because the economy entered a downturn, the state couldn't deficit spend (most can't), and revenues dropped even as the costs of the program increased. But then, I do live in Washington, DC, and am thus not as credible on these matters as employees and board members of an organization meant to push legislative reform through the states.
