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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (50137)	2/7/2009 1:06:54 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Howard Dean is not going to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services... blogs.tnr.com Why It Won't Be Howard Dean; Why That's Too Bad By Jonathan Cohn Posted: Friday, February 06, 2009 1:37 PM Howard Dean is not going to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. As best as I can tell, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is not about to let Dean in the same zip code, let alone the same branch of government. That is the political reality. Still, writers should do more than reflect the political reality. They should try to change it--or, at least, explain why it's flawed. With that in mind, here are two very key assets that Dean would bring to the job--the job, I know, he'll never have. The first is management ability. Ever since Tom Daschle withdrew his name from consideration for HHS Secretary, most of the discussion hs focused on what it meant for the president's health reform agenda. Daschle was a gifted communicator and deft political operator. Everybody wants to find a replacement who has those skills. Dean doesn't have them. But it's not essential that the HHS secretary be one of the key players, privately or publicly, on health reform. Other advisers and officials can take up that role, as can the president himself. On the other hand, it is essential that the HHS secretary take charge of an agency with wide-ranging responsibilities, a vast bureacracy, and a recent history of neglect. Head Start is part of HHS. So are the Centers for Disease Control along with the Food and Drug Administration, two agencies that represent our first line of defense against disease. For the last eight years, they've struggled under an administration that, at best, ignored them and, at worst, used them to advance a socially conservative agenda. The next HHS Secretary must do better. And one way (albeit not the only way) to guarantee that is to find somebody with a proven track record of managing organizations that work on health care. As the five-term governor of Vermont, Dean did exactly that. And while Vermont is a tiny state, the record he complied there was exemplary, not just on health insurance but on the whole range of issues dealing with human welfare. Don't forget, too, that Dean showed pretty good management skills--not to mention judgment--at the Democratic National Commitee. With virtually no support from the political establishment, which held him in nearly universal disdain, Dean was true to his vision and--because of that--helped build a grassroots network that's paying real political dividends today. (Anybody laughing about the 50-state strategy now?) To be sure, even if the HHS Secretary isn't the point person on health reform, he or she will have a seat at the table. But Dean would add something here, too--something that might be in relatively short supply now that Daschle is gone. Dean speaks his mind. And, when he does, he speaks up for the little guy. In the context of health reform, he'd be a consistent voice for coverage and access--for making sure that health reform focused, as it should, on protecting everybody from the financial vulnerability so many now feel because they can't pay their medical bills. Of course, there's always the danger that Dean's abrasive style would alienate more people than it would win over. I love the guy. I count myself as a charter member of the Howard Dean club, as some readers of this publication (not to mention my Dean-o-phobic colleague Jonathan Chait) will recall. But Dean is not always the most persuasive. So perhaps the political reality is as it should be; Dean doesn't belong on the short list. But as long as people are thinking about names, it's worth thinking of what he might have brought to the administration--and which of the more realistic candidates might do the same.

To: geode00 who wrote (50137)	2/8/2009 11:15:34 PM
From: RMF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Some of the stimulus will have an affect this year, but we'll still be up to 10% unemployment regardless, probably by June. To me, the stimulus isn't really the key here. It's how they handle the banking crisis. I'm actually thinking that Nationalization might be the BEST move at this point. When the Japanese had their real estate bust they just kept "feeding their zombie banks for years" and all they got was a 10 year malaise. The banks are probably $4 Trillion in the hole at this point considering all the other bad paper they are carrying besides the mortgages. Just giving them $50 billion here and $100 billion there will just keep this mess going and going and they STILL won't start lending again. Creating a "Bad Bank" to buy up all the bad paper would be a good idea if somebody could actually put a "value" on that paper, but nobody can. The taxpayers would end up owning a bunch of junk and the same guys that got us into this would go back to business as usual. And business as usual lately means not lending to anybody if it even comes close to hurting the bottom line that stock options are based upon.