current climate change bill "worse than nothing"

Very disturbing news out of the House (via dKos):

President Obama says the greenhouse-gas emissions cutting Waxman-Markey bill before Congress will "spark a clean energy transformation." But a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency casts doubt on that claim. According to page 27 of the analysis, published Tuesday, the legislation, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, would actually result in slightly less new renewable energy generation capacity by the year 2020 than if the U.S. continued on a business-as-usual path with no emissions caps.

When President Obama won, I predicted that he'd be lukewarm on progressive health care and foreign policy, but that he'd be at least excellent on climate change and renewable energy. The appointment of Nobel Physicist Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy seemed to confirm my optimism on this particular issue. But with the White House notably absent in pushing for climate change legislation that would actually stop climate change, is it possible that even on this path, both hope and change are at risk of falling short?

Legislation that takes us backwards in developing renewable energy over the next 10 years is not good legislation. Legislation that subsidizing the coal industry is not good legislation. We were promised that climate change legislation would be based on science, not politics. The politics were supposed to take care of themselves on the Biggest Issue Facing The Planet. But instead, we get politics, industry give-aways, and a lot of pretty words.

The bill also won’t sufficiently drive up the price of dirty fossil fuels to encourage a big switch to renewables, the analysis says. (Here’s how that sounds in untranslated EPA-speak: “Allowances prices are not high enough to drive a significant amount of additional low or zero-carbon energy . . . in the shorter term.”)

This isn’t quite consistent with White House talking points. On Tuesday, President Obama told reporters that the legislation before the House of Representatives “will create a set of incentives that will spur the development of new sources of energy, including wind, solar, and geothermal power,” incentives that “will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy.”

Green advocates are split on this bill, known as Waxman-Markey: Greenpeace is against it, and the Sierra Club takes the something is better than nothing approach. In this case, however, something may actually be worse than nothing.

follow-up on "centrism": need for election finance reform

To follow-up on my post this morning, WaPo reported over the weekend on the massive amounts of money that some of the very Congresspeople entrusted to write health care insurance reform legislation are receiving from the private insurance industry. TPMDC summarized:

The Washington Post reports that nearly 30 key lawmakers helping to draft health-care legislation have financial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million. This includes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), with at least $50,000; Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), with between $254,000 and $560,000; and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), with at least $3.2 million.

Emphasis in original.

bipartisanship and "centrism" doesn't get you better health care

Are President Obama and Congressional Democrats more concerned with the facade of bipartisanship than with getting you good health care? Chris Bowers says yes, and that it's all about political cover:

Bipartisanship has nothing to do with reducing the costs of health care or increasing access to health care. However, bipartisanship has a lot do with providing politicians political cover in the event that a piece of legislation fails to deliver on its ostensible purpose.

But if the goal is for political cover, why is the President considering implementing one of the most unpopular of reforms: taxing employer-provided health care plans? This was a proposal that he openly mocked Senator John "Not Your Friend" McCain for during the election, and that 77% of the public opposes?:

The reason Barack Obama's campaign ran so many ads against McCain's proposal to tax health care benefits is that most people hate the idea. When asked whether health care reform should be funded by taxing health care benefits in a recent poll, only 19% favored the idea, while 77% opposed. Over half, 52%, strongly opposed the idea. On the other hand, paying for health care reform through the progressive tax plan proposed by Obama was favored 62%-35%.

One possible explanation is that the political cover that this "bipartisanship" is seeking isn't from the American public, but from private insurance and big pharma lobbyists. This isn't centrist, it's "centrist," with quotation marks, the kind of Clintonista "centrism" that means putting the interests of big business donors who fund a vast majority of the Senators of both parties over the interests of getting good, solid progressive policies passes.

As I commented last week on another Bowers' post, this is the defining battle of the Obama Administration. Failure here means absolutely no bold, transformative change for the next 4 to 8 years.

nyc, three ca cities safest big cities in the u.s.

The FBI's annual Crime in the United States report was released earlier this month, confirming that the Big Apple is the safest of the 25 largest cities in the country, and three Golden State cities--San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego--are the second through fourth safest, in terms of the Total Crime Index.

the moral cost of privatizing the public good

You may remember from an introductory political science class, or from a high school civics class depending on the quality of your high school, the Tragedy of the Commons. In short, the dilemma goes like this: you have a bunch of different sheep/goat/cattle owners who share common grazing land. The commons are sufficient to feed all the existing herds, but each owner could make more money if they increase the size of their herd, while all the other owners would suffer a share of any overburdening of the commons caused by each additional animal. But if all owners increase the size of their herd, the commons is overwhelmed and overgrazed, and no one can support their herds any longer. The "tragedy" is that the "rational" decision--to pursue narrow self-interest at the cost of all others--will ultimately lead to a negative result to everyone. The moral of the Tragedy is that with certain Commons--public goods such as water, air, defense--government regulation and management is the only solution that won't result in a bad situation. We need government where narrow self-interest proves a threat to everyone's prosperity and well-being.

Enter the 1980s and Pres. Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution. To paraphrase revolutionary vanguard Grover Norquist, the goal was to make government so small that "you can drown it in a bathtub." The revolution eschewed the lesson of the Tragedy, instead pushing for the privatization of many traditionally government-operated or -regulated sectors, most famously public utilities.

Unsurprisingly, and to the great injury of all Americans, the Tragedy has proven true where privatization has occurred. Where a government, accountable to the people, is theoretically motivated by benefiting at least a majority of people, a private entity that is contract to provide a traditional government service, or which is no longer bound by government regulation, is motivated only by "rational" narrow self-interest, that is, profit and/or returns for shareholders. This has played out in practice; privatization of Chicago's parking infrastructure has eliminated accountability, allowing government officials to point a finger and blame contractors when, operating in their own self-interest, they rely on unqualified or temporary workers with no experience in the industry, leading to a surge in broken and mislabeled parking meters, increased parking violations and ticketing, and a generally chaotic parking situation.

The results of privatizing public goods has led to real suffering for both people and other businesses. The deregulation of public energy utilities in California in the 1990s, followed by the deregulation of energy commodities trading, allowed Enron (and others) to manipulate the energy market, leading to widespread blackouts (38 "Stage 3" rolling blackouts in California, as opposed to only 1 before the deregulation); Enron actually encouraged private suppliers to shut down plants for "repairs" during shortages in order to increase demand and allow for greater profits.

Despite these painful lessons, cities and states across the country, stuck between the rock of the recession and the hard place of 1990s "balanced budget" laws that prevent deficit spending, are turning toward yet further privatization of public lands, services, goods and Commons as short-term solutions to closing budget gaps. I wrote critically last month on California Gov. Schwarzenegger's short-sighted plan to sell off profitable state properties. Perhaps more disturbingly even than this sale of state properties, however, is the increasingly acted-upon misconception that outsourcing government services will somehow save money. John Petro of the Drum Major Institute has reported, for example, that "practically the entire child welfare system in Florida is privatized, meaning that services such as foster care were outsourced to the private sector." Petro continues on to explain that such privatization does not actually save governments money:

Cities pursue these types of arrangements in order to cut costs. The thinking is that competition drives down the cost of providing these services.

However, the reason that outsourcing these services is often less expensive is because private contractors do not have the same type of labor standards that municipal governments often do. [...]

By privatizing these services municipal governments are pushing down wages and benefits for all workers. As benefits such as health insurance are available to fewer and fewer workers, cities may see the demand for social services increase, possibly erasing any cost reductions that were gained by the privatization.

Another problem with privatization is that the quality of services may suffer. After all, private companies are interested in one thing: profit. These companies have incentives to cut costs by cutting corners.

But the greatest problem is not a problem of financial cost, though it is clear that the idea that privatization of public goods will save money is a faulty one. The greatest problem is the moral cost of privatization, the shunning and outsourcing of the very purpose of government. In Petro's more eloquent words:

What may be worst of all about these deals, however, is the erosion of the vital connection between government and the citizens that government is meant to serve. The privatization of city infrastructure and city services obscures the fact that governments exist in order to provide public goods.

Petro's post, appropriately, is entitled Municipal Governments Selling Our Soul to the Market.

Nowhere, perhaps, are the moral failures of privatization of public goods more evident than in the armed services. As I wrote last month, privatization of support services to Halliburton subsidiary and war profiteer Kellogg Brown and Root has led to the dangerous dehydration of American servicepersons in Iraq, leading to cases of dysentery and forcing troops to steal back their own water that KBR failed to distribute. It was unlikely an isolated incident, given that there are 130,000 contractors [mercenaries] in Iraq, and an additional 120,000 in Afghanistan, nearly half the size of the entire U.S. military presence in those two countries. National security and defense is a public good; when we privatize it, we get bizarre results that not only endanger our troops, but endangers civilians and national security [see the Blackwater/Xe murder-rape cases]. Worse of all, the narrow self-interest of mercenaries is, inevitably, to encourage conflict and greater war, as Democracy Now producer Jeremy Scahill discussed on Bill Moyers:

We've spent [...] $190 billion on the war in Afghanistan. And some estimates say that, within a few short years, it could it could end up at a half a trillion dollars. The fact is that I think most Americans are not aware that their dollars being spent in Afghanistan are, in fact, going to for-profit corporations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These are companies that are simultaneously working for profit and for the U.S. government. [...]

I think that what we have seen happen, as a result of this incredible reliance on private military contractors, is that the United States has created a new system for waging war. [...] You intricately link corporate profits to an escalation of warfare and make it profitable for companies to participate in your wars. In the process of doing that you undermine U.S. democratic processes. And you also violate the sovereignty of other nations, 'cause you're making their citizens in combatants in a war to which their country is not a party. [... This could create] a scenario where you have corporations with their own private armies.

As a U.S. Senator, Barack Obama seemed to be one of the few in Congress who recognized this danger, and he called for strong legislation to regulate and reform mercenaries. In February 2007, he "sponsored legislation defining a legal structure to prosecute State Department contractor crimes in US courts." But as a candidate, and now as President, he has fallen backwards, seemingly resigned to continuing the Bush/Cheney privatization of national security of allowing mercenaries to operate in both combat and service support roles, and ignoring the moral costs involved. Letting private contractors, whether mercenaries or energy traders, manage public goods for their own self-interest is not just bad policy, it is an abdication of the very purpose of government.

what we have versus what we want

Awesome:

What we want:


What we have:

the defining battle of the obama administration

If we don't get a strong, robust public plan option in health care reform, we lose everything.

That's the analysis of Chris Bowers at Open Left, and he's probably right:

[I]f the public option is watered down to a "trigger," then don't expect any major progressive legislation to come from this Democratic trifecta. On any issue. Ever.

Real health care reform--aka, a public option--is the lowest bar for progressives to clear with the current congress. It has the most lobbying behind it, bringing in not only health care reform groups, but also unions and mutli-issue groups like MoveOn. It only requires 50 votes in the senate, whereas Republicans will force 60-votes on virtually everything else. It is a very popular, not only in absolute terms (60%+), but also relatively popular compared to other major Democratic agenda items like climate change. And President Obama won't have a 60%+ approval rating forever, either.

The bottom line is this: if we can't get our most popular major agenda item, during the peak in Democratic popularity, when we need only 50 Senate votes, and on the issue where we have given our strongest lobbying and activist efforts, then we aren't going to pass meaningful progressive legislation on anything else.

Yes, this is about getting true health care system reform. But this is also about defining whether the Obama Administration is willing to fight for any progressive legislation. How hard President Obama pushes for a public option (a real one, not an industry-backed facade, as detailed by economist Robert Reich) will signal whether he will be able to succeed in fulfilling any of his campaign promises in a substantive way, rather than simply a superficial way. If he can't pressure conservative Democratic Senators like Evan Bayh (IN), Ben Nelson (NE), and Arlen Specter (PA) to back him on this one, he will be subject to their whims on every single piece of legislation that his Administration presents. If that happens... well, I hope you have fond memories of the Clinton Era "small change" programs. Because that's all you're going to get.

Ultimately, this is about more than health care system reform, but it is also about health care system reform. The United States enjoys similar levels of efficiency in its public health care spending as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan; the U.S. spends about 6.2% of GDP in this sector and the other countries spend from 6.0% (Japan) to 8.0% (Germany). On the other hand, the United States spends 6.7% of its GDP on private health care, compared to a range of 1.8% to 2.7% in those other countries. I am a firm believer that health care should be considered a human right, and that a health care system must focus first and foremost on promoting and protecting the health of Americans, and that profit-motives take a distant backseat to providing necessary and quality health care. But the numbers cannot be ignored, and for all the conservative chatter about the competitive disadvantage that automaker union health care benefits create, the disadvantage is a symptom of the cancerous growth of for-profit financiers, a.k.a. private insurers. A robust public plan option that is real (i.e., not an imaginary future option that the "trigger compromise" promises), efficient (i.e., not forced to take on the inefficiencies of the private market that another "compromise" requires), and effective (i.e., competitive and free from state-based insurance lobbyist influence, by having a single national pool rather than smaller regional pools) is the minimum of what is needed to even beginning fixing our health care system. It is necessary, not sufficient, but have no doubt that it is neccessary.

51 votes are needed in the Senate; Gov. Howard Dean's campaign for the public plan option counts 36 supporters so far. The only way those who haven't taken a position yet are going to be swayed toward the public plan option is by hearing from their constituents, and in large numbers.

MoveOn.org's Petition to Congress
Stand With Dr. Dean
Contact a United States Senator

quick post: change [jobs], change [textbooks], and more change [needed in the non-profit sector]

Three posts from Mike Connery's eminent Millennial Generation-blog, Future Majority, that I've been sitting on fir a while, so I'll just give it to you all at once.

First, social entrepreneur website Change.org launches a progressive job clearinghouse, for all your job-search needs, at Jobs for Change.

Second, back in the bad-old-days of the Bush Era, social entrepreneur's tried thinking of ways to make it easier for consumers to support progressive businesses, the pinnacle being Advomatic's now-defunct BuyBlue.org. The excellent progressive California grassroots group Courage Campaign has flipped the strategy, taking advantage of an Amazon program that allows you to support the Courage Campaign's efforts to get marriage equality and a democratic budget process, among other things, in the Golden State, while buying your textbooks on the cheap at the same time: Textbooks4Change.

Finally, karlomarcello critiques controversial author Dan Pallota's assertion that the non-profit sector needs to start acting like the for-profit sector in order to compete for talent. I planned on looking into this debate more closely to weigh in on it, as I recently saw the publicly-available numbers on salaries of executive directors at top non-profits (the range is perhaps the most astonishing part). But I was brooding about what to write about Ron Takaki instead, so the research didn't happen. Perhaps if someone else writes something interesting on the topic...

sotomayor judiciary committee hearing on july 13

TPM reports.

r.i.p. ronald takaki: examining ourselves (americans) through a different mirror;

A recent New York Times compare and contrast piece profiling the lives and evolution of the theories on race of Supreme Court Justice Clarance Thomas and Supreme Court Justice-nominee Sonia Sotamayor detailed how, despite visits to Puerto Rico in her youth and growing up in the Nuyorican [New Yorker-Puerto Rican] community, it was really her arrival at college that proved a catalyst for Judge Sotamayor's personal ethnic identity:

In New York, Puerto Ricans were pitied for poverty and blamed for crime. Popular images were dominated by the gangs of “West Side Story” and bumbling comics with broken English. According to friends, Ms. Sotomayor was not active in her high school’s small Latino club. Ethnicity was not something to be ashamed of, they said, but they did not really celebrate it either.

But on Princeton’s manicured campus, Ms. Sotomayor explored her roots in a way she never had on trips to Puerto Rico or in “Nuyorican” circles back home. In a Puerto Rican studies seminar, she absorbed the literature, economics, history and politics of the island, and by senior year, she was writing a thesis on its first democratically elected governor. [...]

Americans are, from the moment they are born, exposed to the realities of race and ethnicity in the United States. But given the lack--and sometimes hostility--to open and honest discussion of the powerful ways that race and ethnicity have impacted and continue to impact our cultural, social, and economic institutions, we are mostly limited to seeing ourselves (Americans) through a single lens of popular conceptions, perpetuated by popular media representations and cultural myths. The ability to study and reflect on how race and ethnicity, despite their realities as social/historical constructs, are deeply integrated into not only who we as a country have been, but who we might be as we move forward, is an invaluable opportunity. For race and ethnicity, though powerful throughout the world, has particular significance in the United States, a nation founded on the principle of strength through difference, unity through pluralism. Hence our national motto, e pluribus unum, out of many, one.

Like Judge Sotamayor, I have had the privilege of attending an undergraduate program that offered courses examining race and ethnicity through a rigorous academic lens. And I don't use the term "rigorous" lightly; while the idea of the study race and ethnicity may cause some to assume that it is a "fluffy" or "easy" area of study, the reality is quite the opposite. Due to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field--one that crosses sociology, ethnography, anthropology, linguistics, history, literature, urban studies, law, and even cultural analyses such as music and media studies--successful students of the subject must master the lexicons and theories of a variety of disciplines. I do not hesitate, as anyone who has discussed my undergraduate experience with me know, to state that my ethnic studies courses were always my most challenging, and significantly more difficult than my political science courses. Given these complexities and challenges in looking at who we are as a nation and how race and ethnicity have importantly shaped who we are, there is and always has been a need for great scholars, authors, and leaders in the field. Ronald Takaki was, in my mind, foremost amongst them.

As the San Francisco Chronicle's Matthai Kuruvila wrote, "Ronald Takaki didn't just teach about race and ethnicity. He helped redefine it." Perhaps most notably, he created the first doctoral-level ethnic studies program in the nation, at UC Berkeley, and helped seed similar departments across California. His students are considered leaders in today's ethnic studies scholarship; one student, Michael Omi, is author of what is sometimes considered a primary textbook of racial and ethnic studies, Omi & Winant's Racial Formation in the United States (1986). He authored over 20 books on the histories of a wide range of American communities, telling stories that had been well known within those communities' oral histories but never before put down on paper.

I had seen his name even as a child. Sitting on my parents' bookshelf was a copy of Takaki's seminal history of Asian Americans, Strangers from a Different Shore. But I never picked it up, intimidated by the size of the volume. It was not until near the end of my first year of college that I read any of his work, in the form of the even larger volume, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. I realize now that I should never have been fearful of the size of Takaki's books, for his prose is accessible and eloquent, and though coming from an academic background, A Different Mirror is less of a "history" and more of a "story." By telling the story of America through "a different mirror," that is, a different way of looking at ourselves, Takaki, in the words of one former student, "pushed and prodded us to ask the epistemological question, 'How do you know what you know?' about this history of the people of the United States, especially given the realities of racially diverse populations in America." Though I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Professor Takaki, his teaching and scholarship has deeply affected me, and multiple generations of students.

It took me a while to write this post, not only because others (including professional journalists) have already eulogized him, but also because it greatly saddened me to hear of the death of a writer and teacher who was so influential to my own thinking about such fundamental questions as who I am and who we are, and who we might all become. Ronald Takaki passed away on May 26, two weeks ago, after a lifetime of vibrant action and thinking, priceless contributions to the field of ethnic studies, and a 20-year struggle with multiple sclerosis. He is survived by his wife and three children. His family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Professor Takaki's name to the Asian Law Caucus, 55 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94111.

More on Professor Ronald Takaki:
Remember Ron Takaki, AsianWeek
In Memory of Ronald Takaki, Political Affairs
Ronald Takaki, Cal ethnic studies pioneer, dies, SF Chronicle
What does it mean to be Asian American [in the Age of Obama]?, Jeff Yang, SF Chronicle

Consider giving to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which funds research for the prevention, treatment, and cure of MS, and provides programs and services to help people with MS and their families live and move forward together.

rethinking higher education

An intriguing post by Sarah Burris over at Future Majority comparing rising college tuition with the fact that many of the most stable job sectors in our economy are based on practical, rather than theoretical/book, knowledge and experience:

[O]ur culture spends a lot of time demanding more from our youth. While [Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew] Crawford talks about making twice as much as an electrician than he did at the nightmare summary writing job [where he mindlessly summarized up to 23 scholarly articles a day], he notes that many would find it repugnant he "didn't live up to his education," even consider it a waste of time and money. Crawford doesn't see a degree as a necessity for greatness.

His running thesis surrounds our systems of high school education that continue to cut classes that teach practical skills over book knowledge. His example is a heartbreaking year he spent teaching Latin in a high school where he swears kids would have had more of a connection to shop class, and absorbed skills that are just as useful.

When it comes to doctors and lawyers, advanced degrees are probably something you don't want to skip out on. But in a world where college is too far out of reach, we owe youth a bit of honesty about potential if they instead undergo proper training. We also owe them the respect deserved of everyone regardless of their class or the school they attended or jobs they hold.

Burris' comparison implies a very important question: what is the point of college? The knee-jerk progressive response, of which I have myself no doubt partaken, is to say that everyone should have access to higher education. But is the corollary belief really that going to college somehow makes everyone a better person, or more qualified to participate in the economy? Is this a realistic or, more importantly, progressive position to take in an era when private college tuition is, in a few cases, hitting or surpassing the $50,000/year mark (the national average for private 4-year universities is $25,143/year, but that's only the cost of tuition, not books, housing, etc.) and even public universities have seen a 6.4% increase in tuition over the last year (up to an average of $6,585/year for public 4-year universities)?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is possible that there's a reason why we should try to have universal participation in higher education, as we believe we should have universal graduation from high school. But perhaps it is time to rethink what the point of college is. One the one hand, there is an underlying implication in the traditional liberal notion that everyone would benefit from college, which is that the institution itself makes one a better social/global citizen, that it has the potential to expand the mind and make Renaissance Men and Women out of all of us. On the other hand, there is a sometimes complimentary but sometimes competing frame that college is needed to get you a job that will support a middle-class lifestyle. The latter, it seems, may be increasingly faulty.

Amy Traub at DMIBlog points out that blue-collar service jobs are often poorly paid due to lack of unionization. But as I'm sure many white-collar, college-educated young workers will tell you, white-collar industries aren't exactly the bastion of unionization or career stability, either. It is clear that unionization will benefit all industries, but it is unclear that the correct response to the demise of America's industrial-fueled middle-class factory sector is to send everyone to college. College is not and cannot be a panacea; the National Bureau of Economic Research study to which Traub cites for the proposition that "[j]obs for college-educated workers are already amongst the highest quality positions out there" attributes the wage premium for college-educated employees from 1980 to 2005 not on the college education itself, but rather on the slowdown on growth of supply of college-educated workers. Universal college education would create greater wage equity, as the movement for universal high school education did in the 1910s to 1980s, but in no way alone guarantees a growth in middle class jobs. This is a point Traub recognizes, explaining the need for greater unionization across new service industries, writing that "no matter how accessible we make higher education, there is no future scenario in which every job in America requires a college degree."

As Burris' argues in her post, it is not clear whether we are being honest with youth about what additional degrees are going to get them, and whether they are the best use of increasingly limited family resources from a purely career-based outlook. Rethinking post-high school job training--and in-high school job training, for that matter--is key to not only recovering economic stability and growth, but to recovering the promise of the American middle-class.

new hampshire sixth state with marriage equality!

After a period of doubt, both houses of New Hampshire's legislature passed (again) legislation establishing marriage equality in the state, and Gov. John Lynch signed it into law today. From AP:

New Hampshire's governor has signed legislation making the state the sixth to allow gay marriage.

Gov. John Lynch was Surrounded by cheering supporters of the move as he signed the three bills about an hour after the key vote on the legislation in the House.

The law will take effect in January, exactly two years after the state legalized civil unions. New Hampshire joins Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Iowa in recognizing same-sex marriages[...]

The Senate passed the measure Wednesday, and the House — where the outcome was more in doubt — followed later in the day. The House gallery erupted in cheers after the 198-176 vote.

"If you have no choice as to your sex, male or female; if you have no choice as to your color; if you have no choice as to your sexual orientation; then you have to be protected and given the same opportunity for life, liberty and happiness," Rep. Anthony DiFruscia, R-Windham, said during the hourlong debate.

Congrats, New Hampshire!

"what is the point of having a crummy piece of legislation just because it's bipartisan?"

Former VT Gov. Howard Dean, M.D., on the need for a public health insurance option in health care reform, versus the need for "bipartisanship":

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Obama's campaign, the former Vermont governor, and author of a forthcoming book on healthcare, said liberal groups would insist that any health legislation include a Medicare-style public insurance option for people under 65.

Forcing insurers to compete with a government plan, Dean said, is the only way to lower premiums dramatically. Asked whether it was more important to have a public option than to have healthcare bill with bipartisan support, Dean said, without hesitating, "Yes."

"I think bipartisan is wonderful, but what is the point of having a crummy piece of legislation just because it's bipartisan?" he said.