During last year's Republican presidential primary season, candidate
Rudy Giuliani succinctly captured what millions of Americans think
about health care abroad. "These countries that say they provide
universal coverage -- they pay a price for it, you know," Giuliani told
his audience. "They do it by rationing care, by long waiting lines, and
by limiting, or I should say eliminating a patient's choice."
In my first
foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the
staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years
earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the
Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing
college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new,
thankfully ephemeral profession: "deprogrammers" who for pay would
kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of
isolation, interrogation… more
After the release of a miserable June jobs report, President Obama
stood with a group of green company CEOs and told reporters that "men
and women like these will help lead us out of this recession and into a
better future."
But if the White House puts too many eggs in the
green recovery basket, we may all be disappointed. The green sector is
simply not large enough or competitive enough to be a major engine of
job creation.
The presidential election of 2009 is the first in American history in which
questions about the citizenship of both major party candidates were raised.
Article II of the Constitution says that "No person except a natural-born
citizen ... shall be eligible to the office of president." During the
campaign, some argued that this disqualified John McCain, because he was born
in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, a
naval officer, was stationed. Also during the campaign, some conservatives
raised questions about whether Obama was born on… more
In 2001, Ted
Halstead and I published a book titled "The Radical Center: The Future
of American Politics." Though I'm not sure we always succeeded, the
goal we set for ourselves was to think freshly about how the legacy of
the New Deal could be revised and updated for the 21st century. We
decided that when it came to benefits our guiding principle should be a
"citizen-based social contract." We chose this phrase, not to
discriminate against non-citizens, but to express two ideas: first,
that benefits like healthcare… more
