The last time the democrats ran a national candidate who came close to your politics, as you express them here, Dean, was in 1960. J.F.K. was a supply-sider, who got the Congress to reduce the tax rate by promising, accurately, that dropping the tax and capital gains rates would produce addional revenue. He also said: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." Notice the lack of any sop to the aggrandisement of Big Labor or trial lawyers.

Since then, the donks have run a succession of Al Gore clones. I don't know exactly when you made your own conversion, Dean, but make no mistake. It was you who changed, not the democrat party. Kennedy was an anomaly. I was young then, but it was no secret to my father, who shared it with his boys, that Kennedy bought the nomination, stole the election, and was very questionable for even receiving the nomination from his own party for the reelection run.

We can spin fairy tales of the greatness of FDR and JFK as much as we want, but the plain fact is that the democrats have always been on the wrong side of history. They drag us into wars, build huge new government entitlements, and generally believe that any problem that a human being has can be solved by government. Therefore, they have no use for religion, morality, and even plain common sense. They fight for the right to perform full term abortions for God's sake. They are shocked at the TEN COMMANDMENTS... in a courtroom! This is not really new, it is just the culmination of the secular humanist dream, coming from the party that is controlled by people just as sure of their rightness as the Bolsheviks and, yes, the fascists.

Sorry Dean, they haven't changed. You have. Like Winnie said, when you were young you had a heart. As a full grown man, you use your brain.

Enh. I can't say I fully agree, Michael, although I see where you're coming from on some of that.

Jimmy Carter, at least on the stump, preached the problems inherent in our really quite disgraceful income tax code and promised military strength and a tough line on the Soviets. He, like JFK, was also all but at war with parts of his party--Tip O'Neill, for example, couldn't stand him. Unlike JFK, however, Carter was so lacking in anything resembling coherent convictions, he's gotten the drubbing he deserved by history. (Although his rehabilitation as a great humanist is largely undeserved, I'll grant.)

Clinton ran as a centrist who wanted to reform welfare and balance the budget. That no one who thinks he was a great President can say what exact policies he implemented that brought that about doesn't change that he did promise to fight for those things.

In fact, outside of his aborted attempt to reform the medical system, he never tried to take us on a massive tax-and spend orgy. His "mammoth" tax increases, wrongly and hysterically attacked by people like Rush Limbaugh, really amounted to no more than a 5% or so increase on "the rich"--which, whatever its merits, was balanced by steep cuts in cap gains--and for all the talk, when Clinton came into office, the top income tax rate was about 34%, and when he left it was about 39%, which is an increase, but is hardly a stunning reversal of the "failed" Reagan tax cuts. (When Reagan took office, the top rate was an apalling 70%--which is where JFK had left it when he cut it down from 90%)

Indeed, throughout his entire 8 years, including his first two when he had a Democratic congress, Clinton did almost nothing to undo the "failed" Reagan fiscal policies. He also worked hard for expanded free trade. If you match that with cap gains and continued moves toward deregulation of certain industries, and you have to, seriously, wonder at these strange people who talk in trimphant terms about how Clinton "undid' all the "horrible damage" of the previous two administrations.

Clinton also signed everything on the highly popular and wildly successful Contract With America--even as he and his party was busy demonizing the Republicans for it.

This is the era when I concluded that Democrats weren't simply wrong about certain issues. Normal people who are mistaken about some things can usually be made to come around over time. But a deep sickness seems to have infested the Democratic Party during that decade. There was such a complete disconnect between what they were saying and what they were doing, I can only think of it in those terms. Even now, their admirers tend to be deeply cynical people, who don't believe politicians have honest emotions, and believe that successful politicians lie all the time and come to power through artifiace and guile.

I also think that's why they hate George W. Bush so much, frankly.

Indeed, it was the people who preached about "the politics of personal destruction" who were the ones who started the 1990s by calling Gingrich and his cohorts Nazis and fascists. Even as their beloved President gave Gingrich almost everything he asked for, then took credit for it, they were still demonizing the very people who'd put that legislation in front of him.

It's pretty clear to me that, at some point, the Democrats, at the national level, came to no longer care about anything--anything at all--except power. Raw, naked power, and nothing but. It was sickening. It still is. These people will literally say anything at any moment.

Very much like their bete-noir Nixon, come to think of it.

I mostly blame people like Carville and Shrum and McAuliff, and vicious hateful bigots like Jesse Jackson, Paul Begala, and Sid Blumenthal. Talk about jackals.

Still, I would hazard a guess that, had Clinton been a more principled and decent man, he would have done better. On the other hand, you have his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, who lacked any vision, any really coherent principles (beyond "stay the course, no major changes" I guess) and who thoroughly deserved to lose his re-election bid.

There have been a string of fairly responsible, forward-thinking Democratic governors and mayors. What's so weird is why a party which can produce such effective and responsible leaders at a local level in middle America turns into such pack of ugly, soulless beasts at the national level.

Ah... Clinton "never tried to take us on a massive tax-and spend orgy"? Can you say 'National Health Insurance?'

As for his "cooperation" with Contract for America, Clinton was a very sly fellow. He was the perfect example of the old saying "when you are being chased by a big mob, your best strategy is to yell 'They went that way, follow me!'". I am to this day amazed at how the Republicans allowed him to take credit for such a large portion of their program... This speaks well of Clinton's political acumen, and the lack thereof for many Republicans.

Please note that 6 of the 8 years that Clinton was in office followed the '94 Republican upset. Slick Willy always was very good at following the prevailing winds.

In fact I think I see a parallel between him & Nixon. Both were percieved as relatively "extreme" (i.e. somewhat to the left and to the right), both had significant personal shortcomings, both were very intelligent, and (here's the kicker) both were instrumental in enacting programs that exemplified the opposing party...

The acts put into effect during the Nixon administration followed a much more liberal pattern than did the Johnson administration, including the EPA, school busing, and Amerind policies.

And both pushed for closer ties to China.

And, frankly, I'm tired of hearing about JFK's "bear any burden" speech. That dumb SOB came within three inches of starting World War Three just so he could look good "fighting communism".

Also, the above is not the policy of a Republic. I'm 100% with Pournelle on this one: "We are the friends of freedom everywhere, but the guardian only of our own." If we aren't careful, we will turn the US into the American Empire before we are through with the "War on Terror"...

Oh yeah, almost forgot: Artie Johnson always said "Veddy Inteddesting!", not "Welly Intelestink!" Usually right before Ruth Buzzie smacked the crap out of him with her handbag... [laughs]

Jeez, Casey, I already said, "outside of his aborted attempt to reform the medical system, he never tried to take us on a massive tax-and spend orgy."

But here's the dirty little secret: we already have an almost entirely government-run health care system.

Not only do we have medicaid and medicare and near-universal health insurance for the children of the working poor, but, by law, no emergency room can turn anyone away if you've got a serious problem (in labor, having a heart attack, broken bones, contusions, whatever), regardless of your ability to pay.

Poor, uninsured people in the United States have access to health care that is better than what 90% of the world has--and much better than the crowned heads of Europe had just 100 years ago.

So now add in the VA hospitals, the indian reservation clinics and hospitals, and the thousands of state, county, and city-run hospitals and medical centers, not to mention the countless charitable outfits, and you actually do have universal health care.

Indeed, this is what Bush was hinting at when he said in one of the 2000 Presidential debates that "uninsured" is a Washington D.C. term--he was just too mangled in his syntax to make it clear. People who are pining away for Single Payer or something like it are somewhat dishonest in their rhetoric: "uninsured" implies that you have no access to medical care, which is simply false. No one in this country--no one--lacks access to fundamental health care that's better than what most people outside the U.S. have access to.

One can make a sensible argument--yes, even on conservative and/or libertarian grounds--that the system needs reforming from the top down, and that doing so would save us substantial money as a nation and as taxpayers.

If the Clintonistas hadn't been so arrogant and highhanded about it, they might have actually done some good on this issue. Instead they allowed it to degenerate into an ideological mess.

Now, if you ask me, the best place to fix it would be at the state level. Item one would be to have medical insurance companies--who are already the most tightly regulated and government-controlled companies outside of the tobacco industry--simply start treating each entire state as a single "group," rather than picking this or that employer.

Then, you voucherize the people currently on Medicaid, Medicare, and the CHIPS program. (That wouldn't be much of a leap, since the CHIPS program is already voucherized in most states, and working fine by all accounts.)

Then you just decide to do with those not eligible for medicaid, medicare, CHIPS, and are unemployed. My suggestion? Create a supplemental program for unemployment insurance to keep your insurance going until you get a new job and can start paying for your coverage again.

I can go on. There are really smart ways we could go about moving the system we have now to a more sensible, less byzantine one that actually has less state interferance, is less confusing, and is in the long run cheaper.

Of course, if what you want is the uber-libertarian system of "no governmenet involvement or regulation or funding of any kind," well, fine. But you aren't going to get that. EVER.

Smart people could get this done. Hillary wasn't smart at all, for all her vaunted intelligence.

I've recently come to the conclusion that some kind of single-payer system is inevitable for sound economic reasons. As genetic testing becomes more precise, health insurance will become less about sharing risk and more of an installment plan for your own personal health care needs. Low-risk individuals will join group plans that don't allow high-risk individuals at all; high-risk individuals will prefer plans that spread the risk evenly, but they'll all be in the same plans, making them de facto high-risk plans. People who are born with poor genetic profiles will therefore find health care more expensive than those with good profiles, and of course due to their health problem will have, as a group, disproportionately reduced earning power, compounding the problem. Now I know life isn't fair, but it seems to me that this development, which I feel is inevitable, defeats the entire purpose of insurance. (Telling the affected people to wait until they get really sick and then go to the emergency room is no solution, either. )

Now one might tihnk this could be addressed simply by legislating that health insurance companies must insure all comers and cannot use genetic profiling as the basis of premiums. However, a friend of mine who's a doctor has related to me the nightmare amounts of paperwork involved in today's system and the lack of control doctors have over patient care. It seems to me that we could solve both problems with one stroke by moving to a single-payer system. He's convinced that even a government bureaucracy couldn't be less efficient than the dozens of corporate bureaucracies that doctors already have to deal with, and at least there would be one point of contact. HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is supposed to address this to some extent, but I think it's delaying the inevitable.

The only question is whether to do this at a state or federal level. As a federalist I lean toward the state level, as this invites some level of competition between states. But I do think that some form of single-payer system for basic health maintenance and catastrophic care is inevitable in my lifetime, and I don't think it'll be the disaster I used to think it'd be.

I think single payer's a bad idea, but I think that single payer has the seeds for a better idea.

I'm in the middle of an article on this. I'll probably post it this weekend.

Jeez, Dean, rip my freakin' head off, why don't you? So I missed a sentance. It was late, and I was tired, so I didn't catch that part.

And, I don't even get credit for mentioning Nixon? I'll admit I missed that reference the first time around, too.

Not to mention you didn't even address the (most important, IMHO) point about Artie Johson...

Some people have no sense of priorities... Cheesh...