Leading Off...

Well, it seems that there are a couple of ways to go here. We could start easy and then tackle more difficult issues -- not that any issue is really easy -- or we could try to tackle the bigger, more complicated ones first and then the "simpler" ones can flow from there. I'm inclined to adopt the former approach, so here goes.

Health care. This is shaping up to be perhaps the number one domestic issue of the campaign. It is also an issue that is prone to a lot of myths, in part because everyone has had personal experience with the health care system and, as human beings, we tend to extrapolate from personal experience to the whole, and in part because it is so easy to lampoon and propagandize. Just yesterday, for example, Guiliani came out with his health care "plan" and it is based entirely on the principle of not turning our healthcare system "French". All objective analyses, of course, point to the French system as essentially equal to ours in quality -- and superior in some areas -- that costs 40% less, but those inconvenient facts shouldn't stand in the way of good old American exceptionalism and a little French-bashing, to boot.

So, then, what is a good solution? For so many reasons, there is no way we can hope to replicate the French system -- French doctors earn a lot less, for example, and the AMA would never allow that to happen -- and we don't want the British system which actually is worse than the U.S. in many areas in delivering services. Yet the current American system of a patchwork of private insurers which only partially cover people and, often, only the healthiest people, is, to use one scholar's term, "sicko." How do we get to universal coverage -- which I do think must stand as the only really acceptable goal -- without making it seem like socialized medicine? Notice I use "seem" in the last sentence. Smart people know that the best-run health care system in the country is run by the govt. in the VA and that the group least likely to complain about health care coverage is the elderly who have Medicare. This then is all about marketing, not about facts. But that is the point of this whole exercise anyhow.

Good luck.