Congressman Tom Perriello, who I profiled this spring, is one of my favorite political barometers: A smart, next-generation Democrat from a swing district, he has a knack for talking about progressive issues with people who aren't progressives. Yesterday, the day Perriello was listed in The Hill as one of 23 House Democrats planning to vote "no" on health care reform, we spoke about where health care reform is in Congress and tonight's speech by the president; a lightly edited transcript follows. Later on, I'll post a similar interview with Senator Chuck Schumer. The president is going to address Congress tonight. What you think he needs to say?What I want to hear from the president is two things: First, I want to hear the narrative of the next generation of American politics that connects the very bold approaches to health-care reform, energy reform, and financial-sector reform. What people are looking for right now is an understanding of how these things connect. They know how messed up things are, and they understand and give us some credit for the fact that we are trying to tackle problems that both parties have whined about for the last 30 years without doing anything. To me, it’s sort of a new capitalism for the common good, it’s an approach that is bold in terms of what it wants to accomplish, but extremely pragmatic and market-based in the solutions that it’s taking. One of the reasons why people had trouble understanding these reforms is that they don’t fit with what they understood for a generation, which is that one side is for market and one side is for government. In fact, what we’re doing is taking market-oriented solutions to problems that only the public sector can fix. People don’t know what box to fit it in, so what I’m looking for from the president is a narrative that explains why there’s this new generation of approaches that starts to put all this in that context, in being a problem-solving generation, a generation that tackles big problems. Second of all, when it comes to health care, I think the most important thing is to delineate for people who currently have insurance what is it about this program, about creating competition, that not only covers the uninsured but also helps others who already have insurance -- reducing costs and adding security for those folks -- if they were to ever lose insurance.-- Tim Fernholz
