Needlenose

Lindsay Beyerstein of the Media Consortium caught up with Howard Dean after an event in New York, capturing her brief, exclusive interview with him on video.

She asked Dean what it would mean if Democrats passed healthcare reform through the Senate using budget reconciliation rules, rather than relying on the whims of faux-centrists (Snowe, Lieberman, Nelson, et al.) to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

His response was that reconciliation would produce a better healthcare reform bill, and not just (as Lindsay notes) because of a lessened need to water the legislation down.

Saying that “the best way to do the public option is to have it be part of Medicare,” Dean points out that using reconciliation rules for a budget resolution would force the bill in this direction, because “there would be no question that an expansion of Medicare was germane and permitted in the budget resolution.”

Another benefit, Dean adds, is that “for political reasons, the Democrats need to get this done by 2010, so some people can sign up for it by 2010. And the only way to do that is to use an existing bureaucracy.”

The advantage isn’t just the typical desire of politicians to point at tangible results of their legislative work, either:

Implementing it [a public option] immediately for significant numbers of Americans is going to deflate all the lies that Republicans tell about this bill. Once people actually start to sign up, they’re going to find out that all those things weren’t true.

. . . Once health care reform actually goes into effect, the Republicans who are only selling fear and anger — that’s all they’re selling — that has to go away, because reality will always trump fear and anger.

Dean cites his experience with civil-unions legislation in Vermont as proof of this. All Democrats need to do is find the will to make the reality happen.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Back in November ’03, when King George the Witless announced his plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis and gradually withdraw our troops, I made the point that it wouldn’t be so easy to withdraw. Although the conventional wisdom is that the Iraqis want us gone, both Swopa and I have argued that matters really aren’t so simple; there are many folks that are just itching to take on the Great Satan and kick his ass.

During the period of (general) quiet following the November edict, when the (American) body count was a one-a-day trickle, political pundits pronounced that the ’04 election was going to be about the economy, not about the war. Perhaps that could explain why most Dems gravitated to Kerry as more ‘electable’ than Dean.

But in my November prediction, I suggested that it wouldn’t be too hard for the Iraqis to keep their American pinata around. And thanks to Preznit Dumbass and his reactionary supporters, it looks like we’re about to swim deeper into the quicksand.