It's always disconcerting to me when I see the AP, Mark Halperin and Daily Kos featuring the same headlines. The current media meme is that Daschle's nomination is in doubt, and recent daily kos diaries have played their part in reinforcing this meme including this recc'd diary:
Daschle needs to go
But doesn't anyone remember this recc'd diary from political junquie from last November:
Why the GOP fears Tom Daschle
Remember now?
As (conservative) U.S. News and World Report blogger James Pethothoukis said yesterday in a piece entitled "How Tom Daschle Might Kill Conservatism,"it turns out that the fearsome harbinger of free-market doom is the mild-mannered ex-U.S. senator with the little, red glasses, Tom Daschle."
If we really want universal healthcare, we need to have Tom Daschle's back.
As political junquie discussed last November, the GOP recognizes that passage of universal healthcare would be a political game changer because economically underprivileged conservative voters would support it indefinitely.
Andrew Sullivan put it this way in his post Tom Daschle: Elephant Hunter:
. Obamacare could kill the GOP
Quoting from the article by James Pethokoukis:
Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."
Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."
Daschle is one of the key appointments in the Obama administration, and I believe that Obama will have his back on this one. Healthcare was one of the top three priorities of the campaign and as written by Ezra Klein extensively in his blog for American Prospect and also in this feature article, byy appointing Tom Daschle and Jeanne Lambrew, Obama isn't just signaling that he is serious about health care, he's putting it in the hands of people who will get it done.:
Health Care Heavyweights
We need to not have such short-term memories, guys, yes, this is annoying, disappointing, distracting and so on, but we need need to keep our eyes on the bigger prize.