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Dean's Blind Spot [on Health Reform]
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| Contributor | Monsieur |
| Last Edited | Monsieur Dec 18, 2009 10:55am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Ron Brownstein |
| News Date | Friday, December 18, 2009 04:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Maybe one reason former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and so much of the digital Left can so casually dismiss the Senate health care reform bill is that they operate in an environment where so few people need to worry about access to insurance.
The 2004 presidential campaign that propelled Dean to national prominence was fueled predominantly by "wine track" Democratic activists-generally college-educated white liberals. (In the virtually all-white 2004 Iowa caucus, for instance, exit polls showed that two-thirds of Dean's votes came from voters with a college degree.) Those are the same folks, all evidence suggests, who provide the core support for online activist groups like MoveOn.org or Dean's Democracy for America and congregate most enthusiastically on liberal websites. (According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, college graduates are more than twice as likely as those with only a high-school degree to communicate about politics online.) Along with Dean, those digital Democratic activists are generating the loudest demands to derail the Senate bill.
No president has ever come as close as Barack Obama is today to moving the nation toward universal health coverage; no universal coverage bill had ever before passed the House, nor has one ever advanced as far in the Senate as the bill now under debate. For Dean to insist that Senate Democrats start over after that grueling struggle is a little like suggesting that American troops on the outskirts of Berlin in 1945 should have retreated back to France because D-Day wasn't choreographed just right. |
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