A 5.29 plan

Barack Obama was at the University of Iowa hospital today, and I must say that's a fine place for an Illinoisan to spend a May 29 in a year ending in seven, though I doubt they send him home with a brilliant and beautiful baby girl Hawkeye in a day or two. You've got to know the right people for that to happen. Or, in my experience, arrive pregnant, and in labor. But not only does the UIHC provide an excellent location for the delivery of an altogether excellent child, it apparently provides an excellent backdrop for revealing one's presidential health care plan, especially if one is out to prove one's altogether excellence to Democrats in general and those caucus-going types that might be found around Johnson County, home of the U of Iowa.

For the sake of the party, I hope Obama does prove to be altogether excellent, though I still prefer Edwards, who, I should point out, was months ahead on the health care thing. But, given that any rational statement that the white guy makes while he's in a race with the potential first black guy and potential first woman guy will not be news, I guess we could always talk about his unfortunate hair cut. At any rate, the point that I, a white woman guy, have not yet bothered to make was about plans. Or, if you'll excuse the quirk, and lord know that if you're here and reading, you've excused plenty, pl*ns.

My good friend and I have learned that to even call something a pl*n is to doom it, forever and immediately, to failure, death, and utter extinction. There may not be any reason for it to fall apart so catastrophically, but what looked fine one moment will become the Kansas City Super NIT the next. That, in our experience, is just the way it is once one starts throwing the P word around. So when these presidential aspirants start dragging out these highly detailed pl*ns, for which they've paid countless experts untold dollars, I just start to wonder.

While a president ought to have a grip on the big picture and the ability to explain how his vision differs from current reality and plenty of specifics to back up all of it (at the moment we're 0-3), I'm not sure an excessively detailed legislative proposal that will never even get proposed does anything but get us off track--especially if it's just more of the same. Instead of being about how things could be these pl*ns are too much about how things are, but money talks, and, contributes.

I guess it's the same as with this Congress, who, by the system and by the numbers, perhaps cannot really do much, but I still wish there were a greater sense of urgency and a greater willingness to say what seems to be plainly true instead of playing the political odds. Now that he's irrelevant, Kerry seems to be doing more of that, at least according to the e-mails that still arrive in a little used inbox of mine. Those who are still striving to stay relevant don't think they can afford that. It's a multibillion dollar machine, and no one is going to be much rocking the well-heeled boat. But, we need a president who can lead, not a 536th legislator, and not just a new handbasket to continue our trip in, especially since this one is about to burst into flames.