Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen notes that it’s getting to be an exclusive not to have interviewed President Obama. And on the main agenda item driving Obama’s overexposure, Cohen writes: “As a single (actually, divorced) payer, I cannot for the life of me figure out why Obama did not simply expand Medicare, lowering the eligible age until everyone was covered. This would take one House committee and one Senate committee and one news conference. It would both provide your average patriotic American with health insurance and keep Obama off TV. This is known as a win-win.”
Vice President Walter Cronkite? Frank Mankiewicz, director of Sen. George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, writes in the Washington Post that the idea was discussed but rejected, on the assumption that the CBS newsman would decline. (McGovern eventually went with Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew after revelations of his hospitalizations and shock treatments for depression.) According to Mankiewicz, Cronkite told McGovern decades later, “I’d have accepted in a minute; anything to help end that dreadful war.” But would it have mattered? The ticket of McGovern and replacement running mate Sargent Shriver lost to President Nixon 61 to 37 percent.
In the debate over climate change and energy security, nuclear power gets barely a mention. But it has its attractions, argues John Dendahl, a Rocky Mountain Foundation senior fellow, in the Denver Post: “Among those are a half-century safety record unequaled by any major industry in history, zero carbon emissions, low operating expenses, no dependence on bad guys for fuel — and continuous output 24/7.” He also called it a “myth” that nuclear plants’ radioactive waste defies safe disposal, pointing to the safety record over the past 10 years of New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Even the editors of the conservative National Review say “birthers” should move on: “The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. . . . The director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy. Given that fact, we are loath even to engage the fanciful notion that President Obama was born elsewhere, contrary to the information on his birth certificate, but we note for the record that his mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.”
The editorial concludes: “Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as ‘people of the world,’ as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the USA.”
