I spent the first part of the lunch keynote at the Families USA Conference trying to figure out why I found Ken Salazar's speaking style so odd. It's periods. He. Puts his. Periods. In front of. Most of. The words. He. Says. Add in a metronome's cadence and an allergy to variations in pitch -- the man says the words "moral imperative" as if it were an item on his grocery list -- and you have a speech focusing on the outrageous, but devoid of any evident sense of outrage. The content, however, is mildly heartening. Salazar is a moderate in the David Broder sense of the word -- the type of Democrat who could prove central to health reform, or central to blocking its chances. He's the sort of Senator who needs to be kept near to the legislation if it is to have any hope of passage. So after a slow amble through the values of his parents and his ranch in Colorado, he slowly wound his way to the issue, and his role in it. "We must finally embrace," he said, "as a society, the concept that health care, for every Americans, is a fundamental right." He promised it would be the top domestic priority for the next president, and the next Congress. If the commitment is there, however, the confidence is not. Salazar, bizarrely, said he knew the solution to the war in Iraq, understood how to solve the climate crisis. Health care, however, baffled him. So he introduced legislation for a national commission on the subject to tell us what to do. The legislation failed, and so Salazar sits in an odd, and awkward, space: Certain something must, and will, be done, but uncertain as to what it should be, and so uncommitted as to what it must be. It's support of the softest kind, and a testament to poor prep work in the United States Senate that prominent Democratic Senators aren't articulating a more unified and aggressive set of principles than this. If they need, I could suggest some reading materials...
