James Surowiecki previews Obama's big healthcare speech tonight:
[It] seems to me that Obama has already figured out what he needs to say, and, in fact, he said it on Labor Day, in his speech to the AFL-CIO, when he described the goal of health-care reform as “security and stability for folks who have health insurance, help for those that don’t.” The easiest (and perhaps only) way to enact meaningful health-care reform in the U.S., as I wrote about here, is to convince Americans that reform will offer them something that their current insurance plans (which seventy per cent of Americans are satisfied with) can’t offer them: security. That means two things at the very least: that if you lose your job, you won’t lose the ability to buy affordable insurance, and it means that if you get sick, you won’t find out that your insurance company has rescinded your policy or that later on it’s impossible to get insurance.
And after the president has offered a plausible account of reform that seems to enhance individual security - against losing your healthcare suddenly, against finding you can't get insured because of a pre-existing condition, against realizing that your insurance won't cover what you thought it would - we'll see where the "debate" heads. My sense is that Americans are open to persuasion, and that if they have to choose between a reasonable president who seems to have tried hard to accommodate the views of others and a rabid Republican base screaming "socialism!" and "death panels!", they will go with the guy they voted for last year.
Maureen is 90 percent right and yet 100 percent wrong this morning. Obama does not defeat his opponents by being Rocky. He never has. He defeats his opponents like this.