This is one reason why I'm not worrying too much about policy papers at this point:
But most of the issues that matter to me are either mainstream Democratic issues that all serious candidates for the Democratic nomination know to support or they are so out of the mainstream that all serious candidates know better than to publicly embrace. For example, I want single payer health coverage for every American. I have no ideological interest in the health care plans being put forward by Edwards, Clinton, or Obama, and I could give two shits about the minor distinctions between them. When I see someone like Paul Krugman get all worked up about mandates to make every American purchase health insurance from a giant health insurance corporation, I think Paul Krugman is a complete pinhead asshole. The idea that someone would throw a temper tantrum over someone's campaign proposal for a shitty (and bound to be profoundly unpopular) boon to the insurance corporations...a policy masquerading as progressive policy...is enough for me to put a fist through a Princeton professor's office wall. But I recognize that if you have dedicated the last decade of your life, under Republican congressional rule, desperately trying to cobble together a lukewarm pro-corporate health care plan that might pass through Tom DeLay's House, you might just get upset if people don't leap for joy at your plan to force every American, no matter how poor, to become a customer of some giant HMO provider.
Visit the Booman Tribune's post to read more on judging candidates by their "crowd."
