Rusted Sky

As I've said before - Democrats depend on a problem, an issue, to get into office. It's also important that they LOOK like they're solving the problem, while actually NOT doing a blessed thing to take it off the table. Case in point...

CJR: Watch the Democrats, Part II

A story in The Hill a few weeks ago, which we reported on, offered some grim comments from members of the Senate about prospects for health reform that have reverberated. Among others, they reverberated with Ezra Klein at The American Prospect, who commented on the senators’ comments and later that day ran two follow-up clarifications from Senator Jay Rockefeller and Senator Max Baucus. Rockefeller had originally said: “We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff. What they are doing is…laying out their ambitions.” Baucus had told The Hill that the groundwork for reform was being laid through hearings, but he projected an uphill battle ahead. “If they try to solve all the problems, it’s going to be difficult.”

Good thing they'll not actually try then, isn't it? Oh, you'll get a lot of handwaving - but little in the way of actual health care reform.

And I do believe that's a feature, not a bug.

Update - There's this from the link above. Emphasis added...

The more skeptical among us might point out that it is also precisely what you do if you have no intention of moving ahead with legislation. On the Hill, they don’t call such activities “paralysis by analysis” or dog-and-pony shows for nothing. Years ago when I was a cub reporter at the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Senator Philip Hart, who was known as the conscience of the Senate, came by one Sunday afternoon. We talked about consumer protection laws, and he told me he was holding hearings on a fish inspection bill that I was interested in. Then the bill is going to pass, I naively asked the senator. No, said Hart, those hearings are just dog-and-pony shows to make the public think we are doing something. That’s a lesson I never forgot, and it is relevant for any journalist who will cover the nitty-gritty of health reform legislation next year.

Out in Montana, the home turf of Senator Baucus, Mike Dennison, a reporter in the state bureau for Lee Newspapers, seems to understand what Hart meant. Dennison wrote a piece that X-rayed the same fuzzy quotes and signals that The Hill reporter got. Right at the beginning Dennison told readers that Baucus says he is making health reform a top priority this year and next but hasn’t spelled out many details. Instead, Dennis reported, he has laid out five principles he wants to pursue. Ah, principles! That’s another way of dodging the substance when you don’t want to commit. Dennison quoted Bob Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Moffit said what the boundaries of journalism would not let Dennison say. “None of these things are spelled out. The language doesn’t tell me anything about what the policy actually is. It’s a good sound bite, but it doesn’t say anything.”

Isn't that what's important? That it sound good, not that it say anything?

Looks like people are finally starting to wise up. The internet makes it MUCH more difficult to disguise such hand-waving.

J.