Posted by: McQ on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 If you think Tom Daschle has been hanging out in South Dakota since his Senatorial defeat, think again. He's been in Washington DC working for the firm Alston & Bird. The WaPo says he's never been a lobbyist but admits that Alston & Bird have a lobbying arm. Of course it tends to stretch credulity that a powerful and well-connected former Senate leader would be employed by such a firm, with such an "arm" and never be called to aid in any Captiol Hill lobbying effort. But apparently that's the fiction that's going to be foisted upon us and the WaPo is content to run up the first trial balloon. Memo to WaPo - no sale. His wife is a registered lobbyist and will accordingly resign from her firm to prevent any "conflict of interest". How nice. CNN reports: The sources, who are in a position to know, said that Daschle negotiated that he will also serve as the White House health “czar” — or point person — so that he will report directly to the incoming president.Ezra Klein chimes in: This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform.Klein gets it precisely right. This is a pick in which the cabinet position is simply an artifice to allow Daschle the authority and the positioning to ramrod government health care through Congress. And I agree with Klein that the Obama administration is going to waste little time in putting the wheels in motion to take over as much of that as they can manage. Daschle wrote a book entitled "Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis". In it he recommends the establishment of a government entity modeled after the Federal Reserve Board to oversee health care in the US. No possibility of a problem with a centrally controlled health care system is there? At the time it was published, then Sen. Obama wrote this about the book: "The American health-care system is in crisis, and workable solutions have been blocked for years by deeply entrenched ideological divisions" ... "Sen. Daschle brings fresh thinking to this problem, and his Federal Reserve for Health concept holds great promise for bridging this intellectual chasm and, at long last, giving this nation the health care it deserves."So, banks, financial institutions, possibly the auto industry and health care too? Think of the DMV at the emergency room and prepare yourself to embrace the suck. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TrackBacks | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Return to Main Blog Page | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Comments For This Post | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Previous Comments to this Post |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Add Your Comment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| Vicious Capitalism |
Buy Dale's Book!
|
