Assessing the Assessors (Democrat)
After the President's State of the Union, I moved from the computer to the television and because I was hoping for a new Boston Legal, I immediately switched to ABC and caught some of Charles Gibson's post-speech wrap-up.
What struck me as I watched him interview Hillary Clinton, followed by Barack Obama with essentially the same questions was twofold, first I noticed the way both candidates played to their base in response to his question about the health care proposal, then I noticed the specifics in Hillary's approach toward Iraq, while Mr Obama seemed content with platitudes and empty rhetoric.
There's no way that I can do justice with a compare and contrast on the candidates' answers about Iraq and stay within the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law, so I invite anyone and everyone to play both of the above-linked clips and make their own judgements. Of course, if you'd like to follow-up with a comment to this post or a transcript of your own, please feel free and while I'm at it; Please note that if you load Hillary first, the Obama plainly visible in the sidebar is from this morning, so you'd have to scroll down or follow my link to get his response from last night, which would put the two candidates on equal footing.
Nevertheless, here's a transcript of their responses to Mr Gibson's health care question, so that I can illustrate my thoughts about their answers; how each appeared to play toward their base and how they have different approaches toward the issues.
Hillary Clinton
But with respect specifically to the health care proposal: The details we know so far are really troubling. I mean we're talking about exchanging one regressive tax deduction for another, and funding this alleged expansion of health care by cutting money to public hospitals and community health centers. So, we would be decimating the safety net in order to try to use the tax code to create more opportunities for people to go into the market, whether or not they can buy anything. So, we'll have a lot of time to debate that.
Barack Obama
What I saw that concerned me is that I don't see a way of controlling costs through this process and for ordinary families right now, one of their biggest concerns is rising co-payments, deductibles, premiums. It's not clear that the overall system is going to see significant cost containment and that I think is something that has to be addressed. And quality improvements, making sure we get more bang for the buck that wasn't part of the proposal. It does appear though that potentially you could get some additional coverage and so, one of the things we've got to look at is given the amount of money the President is proposing to spend, at least on the tax revenue side, are we going to actually get the most coverage that we could, or are there other approaches. But, I think that's a conversation that we should have with the President.
Unfortunately, I didn't see a Charles Gibson with any of the other candidates and I'm not finding anything online, so in the interest of fairness, here's a link to a thing John Edwards did on MSNBC and another to his written statement which was released, almost immediately following the official Democratic response. And, I know that Bill Richardson did an on-camera with the local ABC/CNN affiliate for their late news, but I didn't see it and I can't find any clips of him anywhere, so here's a link to his campaign's written statement which is dated last night, but wasn't available on the website, as late as 4 AM, Mountain.
Finally, because it's me and I like linky-dinky posts, I'm going to throw out links to the things Ms Clinton and Mr Obama did with MSNBC and try to throw particular attention toward that of the Senator from Chicago because it too, illustrates a couple of points.
What struck me as I watched him interview Hillary Clinton, followed by Barack Obama with essentially the same questions was twofold, first I noticed the way both candidates played to their base in response to his question about the health care proposal, then I noticed the specifics in Hillary's approach toward Iraq, while Mr Obama seemed content with platitudes and empty rhetoric.
There's no way that I can do justice with a compare and contrast on the candidates' answers about Iraq and stay within the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law, so I invite anyone and everyone to play both of the above-linked clips and make their own judgements. Of course, if you'd like to follow-up with a comment to this post or a transcript of your own, please feel free and while I'm at it; Please note that if you load Hillary first, the Obama plainly visible in the sidebar is from this morning, so you'd have to scroll down or follow my link to get his response from last night, which would put the two candidates on equal footing.
Nevertheless, here's a transcript of their responses to Mr Gibson's health care question, so that I can illustrate my thoughts about their answers; how each appeared to play toward their base and how they have different approaches toward the issues.
Hillary Clinton
But with respect specifically to the health care proposal: The details we know so far are really troubling. I mean we're talking about exchanging one regressive tax deduction for another, and funding this alleged expansion of health care by cutting money to public hospitals and community health centers. So, we would be decimating the safety net in order to try to use the tax code to create more opportunities for people to go into the market, whether or not they can buy anything. So, we'll have a lot of time to debate that.
Barack Obama
What I saw that concerned me is that I don't see a way of controlling costs through this process and for ordinary families right now, one of their biggest concerns is rising co-payments, deductibles, premiums. It's not clear that the overall system is going to see significant cost containment and that I think is something that has to be addressed. And quality improvements, making sure we get more bang for the buck that wasn't part of the proposal. It does appear though that potentially you could get some additional coverage and so, one of the things we've got to look at is given the amount of money the President is proposing to spend, at least on the tax revenue side, are we going to actually get the most coverage that we could, or are there other approaches. But, I think that's a conversation that we should have with the President.
Unfortunately, I didn't see a Charles Gibson with any of the other candidates and I'm not finding anything online, so in the interest of fairness, here's a link to a thing John Edwards did on MSNBC and another to his written statement which was released, almost immediately following the official Democratic response. And, I know that Bill Richardson did an on-camera with the local ABC/CNN affiliate for their late news, but I didn't see it and I can't find any clips of him anywhere, so here's a link to his campaign's written statement which is dated last night, but wasn't available on the website, as late as 4 AM, Mountain.
Finally, because it's me and I like linky-dinky posts, I'm going to throw out links to the things Ms Clinton and Mr Obama did with MSNBC and try to throw particular attention toward that of the Senator from Chicago because it too, illustrates a couple of points.