When it comes to health care reform, many Americans are still asking: What’s in it for me? They should put that question to Californians who have individual insurance coverage from Anthem Blue Cross--and just learned their premiums will be going up by almost 40 percent this year.

Beneficiaries started learning about the rate hikes last week, according to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the story. The premiums will, I’m sure, cause real hardship for many people.

This is not, to be clear, just another story of medical care getting more expensive because of technology, over-treatment, monopoly pricing, or any of the other familiar drivers of system-wide costs. Yes, health care costs in this country are rising, faster than any of us would like. But inflation--that is, the increase from year to year--rarely exceeds 12 percent. And Wellpoint, Anthem’s parent company, reports that its medical expenses rose by only around 9 percent this year. Obviously, something else is going on.

In a statement, Anthem explained that a big part of the problem was the down economy--and the effect it was having on people’s decision to buy insurance. As budgets get tighter and people look to cut back on expenses, some people will decide to drop insurance. And, overall, they will tend to be people in better health, since they are most willing to risk going without coverage. The whole point of insurance is to pool risk, so that premiums from healthy people (who make up most of the population) cover the expenses of unhealthy people (who constitute a small fraction of the population). When healthy people start dropping coverage, rates for the unhealthy go up, to the point where they become unaffordable.

As Karen Tumulty notes, that's a pretty good argument for some sort of universal health care system, in which everybody has to maintain coverage. The idea that insurance premiums would rise more quickly at precisely the moment when more people are struggling financially is positively perverse.

But, most likely, a slow economy isn't the only culprit here. It appears that not all Anthem beneficiaries are seeing such huge rate increases. Only some are. If so, there's more to this story.*

(Warning: The rest of this item is pretty wonky.)

When insurance companies sell coverage in the individual market--that is, when they offer polices to people one-on-one, rather than through employers--they don’t typically put everybody’s premiums into one big pot. Instead, they usually break up their business into different “blocks.” A block could be everybody living in a particular area, everybody fitting a certain demographic profile, or everybody buying a particular type of policy, just to use a few examples. And after enough people are in a block, the insurer will often “close” it, meaning they don’t add new beneficiaries to that particular group.

Insurers will set the premiums in each block based on their projection of what kinds of medical bills people in the block are going to incur. And so, for example, a block that has a a lot of young, healthy men will probably have really cheap premiums--since, on the whole, young, healthy men tend not to have very high medical expenses.

(Young, healthy women are another story. They have the actuarially unfortunate habit of getting pregnant and having babies.)

Over time, the blocks evolve. And, inevitably, some of those young, healthy men will develop medical problems. They’ll get injuries or develop life-threatening illnesses--the type that require extended hospitalizations, long stints in rehabilitation, and all sorts of prescriptions. Rates in the group will start to go up.

At that point, people in the block will seek better deals. And the healthy ones will find such deals quickly. But the ones with the medical problems won't have such an easy time. If they shop around, they're likely to find only policies that provide way too little coverage or cost way too much. One way or another, they're going to end up paying a lot more for their medical care.

Policy wonks call this the adverse selection death spiral. And the key thing to remember is that it happens all the time, even when the economy is strong. It is inevitable, given the way the individual market works, although insurers can make it better or worse depending upon how aggressively they want to pursue profits.

Did I mention that Wellpoint made $2.7 billion in the final quarter of 2009? Or that its CEO, Angela Braly, made just under $10 million last year?

Piecemeal reforms, unfortunately, can't really stop this from happening. As it is, the law prevents insurers from raising rates (or canceling coverage) only on individuals with high medical expenses. That's why insurers end up raising rates for entire blocks as costs go up. The favorite conservative answer--high-risk pools--don't offer much relief, either. They tend to be underfunded, which generally translates as less coverage for higher prices. They may be better than nothing, particularly for people who don't have coverage already, but they're not a real solution.

No, the best way to avoid adverse selection, as I've argued many times, is to create one giant insurance pool--in which everybody, healthy and sick, gets coverage at the same rates. And, roughly speaking, that's what the Democratic health care bills would do, by creating insurance exchanges through which all individuals in a given state would buy coverage.

In these exchanges, insurers couldn't charge different rates based on medical risk; they'd have to cover a defined set of benefits and would have to spend most of their revenue on actual patient care. The government would require (almost) everybody to get insurance--and then offer subsidies, so that (almost) everybody could comply with the requirement. Projections suggest most people in the individual market would end up paying less for their coverage than they would otherwise, while getting stronger, more reliable benefits.

It's not the most elegant solution or, to be sure, a perfect one. (A single-payer system would be even better, in my humble opinion.) But it's good enough, certainly. Just ask the people of Massachusetts, where such a system is up and running--and rather popular, as well.

Of course, only a relatively small portion of Americans carry individual insurance coverage. The majority of people with private coverage get it through their employers, where such stark rate increases are rare. But, without reform, it's entirely possible--some would say likely--that more and more employers will be dropping coverage, leaving more and more individuals to buy it on their own. That's why the California Anthem story should get everybody's attention.

*I say "most likely" and "appears" because it's impossible to know for sure without more information and Anthem isn't answering questions beyond an official statement it published this week. That may soon change, however. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent Anthem a scathing letter, noting the company's large profits and seeking an explanation for the rate hike, while Representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak are hauling Braly into hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Chairman.

Not long ago, Andrew Sullivan had ultra-hawkish views on Israel and the Middle East. The problem as he saw it, was very simple: The Muslim world was anti-Semitic and wanted to kill all the Jews. Naive Western governments pushed innocent Israelis to make peace, when the only answer was force. Here are some excerpts from an August 2001 column he wrote:

[T]he notion of a negotiable peace with the murdering hoodlums who run the PLO was always a fantasy. ...

Or maybe these optimists simply read the report of the recent suicide bombing printed in USA Today and noted by conservative commentator George Will: "The blast ... sent flesh flying onto second-storey balconies a block away. Three men were blown 30ft; their heads, separated from their bodies by the blast, rolled down the glass-strewn street ... One woman had at least six nails embedded in her neck. Another had a nail in her left eye. Two men, one with a six-inch piece of glass in his right temple ... tried to walk away ... A man groaned ... His legs were blown off. Blood poured from his torso ... A three-year-old girl, her face covered with glass, walked among the bodies calling her mother's name" ...

Here's the scenario, floated by the Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the brilliant analyst who helped formulate the Reagan doctrine: "A lightning and massive Israeli attack on every element of Arafat's police state infrastructure -the headquarters and commanders of his eight security services, his police stations, weapons depots, training camps, communications and propaganda facilities--with a simultaneous attack on the headquarters and leadership of Arafat's Hamas and Islamic Jihad allies.

"Arafat has given Israel war; he will now receive it." ...

Under the onslaught of constant murder and fear, the Jewish public might be convinced to surrender enough arms and territory to give the PLO what they really want: a chance to destroy Israel altogether and murder any Jew they can find.

And here is one from 2002:

Then there was the recent Not In Our Name rally in Central Park, demonstrating against a potential war against Iraq. Around the edges of the rally copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the classic forged document of 19th-century anti-semitism, were being sold. According to the New York Sun, this peddling of anti-semitic tripe was not entirely accidental.

One protester said: “There are interest groups that want Israel to dominate Palestine. If Bush goes with them and is too critical, he might lose their support . . . the international financiers have their hooks in everything.” Ah, those international financiers. Remember them? America’s anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler’s, is now a cultural norm across much of the Middle East. It’s the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis.

The style will be immediately familiar to any reader who has discovered his lively blog over the last few years: Sweeping moralistic pronouncements, graphic descriptions of violence committed by the villains deployed as moral bludgeons, innocents beset by violence-crazed monsters. Except, of course, the innocents and the villains have now swapped places. Once infinitely tolerant of Israel's need to defend itself militarily against terrorism, Andrew is now completely intolerant. Once he saw anti-Semitism lurking everywhere among Israel's critics; now he sees the perception of anti-Semitism as nothing but a weapon to silence criticism of the Israeli war machine.

Naturally, such a jarring reversal has prompted speculation about Andrew's motives. Leon has written what I consider to be a trenchant and persuasive dissection of Andrew's (current) worldview on Israel and the Jewish lobby. Unfortunately, Leon also implies at several points that Andrew has succumbed to anti-Semitism. I object to that conclusion. Two years ago, Leon wrote, "I know as an incontrovertible fact, based on my long acquaintance with him and his writings, that he is not an anti-Semite." Anyone is entitled to change his mind, but I haven't -- I agreed with what Leon wrote then, and I still do.

Here are my problems with impugning Andrew's motives on this question. Leon notes, correctly, that Andrew has begun repeating tropes that happen to track classic anti-Semitic canards. His obsession with the singular power of the Jewish lobby, writes Leon "has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people." Agreed. But just because an idea has a revolting provenance, it does not follow that everybody who subscribes to any version of it shares the same motive. The exploration of the link between race and I.Q. also has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people. It is, however, a legitimate topic of inquiry.

Leon agrees that the pro-Israel lobby wields significant power in U.S. policymaking, and determining this level of power is also a legitimate topic of inquiry. At one point on the spectrum of thought you have what Leon and I would consider a realistic assessment of the power of the Israel lobby. As you move further along the spectrum, you eventually approach Osama bin Laden's view of the power of the Israel lobby. Clearly, bin Laden qualifies as an anti-Semite. But the judgment can't be that as soon as you go just a little further along the line from my view, then you're an anti-Semite. There has to be some room on this question to be merely wrong -- to harbor an exaggerated view of the power of the Israel lobby without being an anti-Semite. Otherwise debate becomes impossible.

Now, I believe that those who wish to explore areas that coincide with the favorite obsessions of bigots have an obligation to do so with more care than they might use with other subjects. Andrew has been careless, but carelessness isn't bigotry.

Leon writes very carefully about the Middle East. I find his writing on this subject extremely well-informed and, in my opinion, invariably persuasive. There are topics about which I'd say the same about Andrew, but the Middle East is not one of them. (None of us can be an expert in everything.) Indeed, on the Middle East, Andrew falls prey to a habitual tendency to see the world divided between children of darkness and children of light. This is not a problem for a writer who is describing conflicts between Democrats and Republicans. When the parties involve happen to correspond with ethnic groups, then it's going to be impossible to avoid language that appears racialistic. I don't think that Andrew's transformation from overwrought hawk to overwrought dove is driven by, or has brought about, a different view of Jews. It seems instead to be the shattering of a brittle worldview and its replacement by a new worldview, equally brittle.

Via Sarah Goodyear, it looks like a number of city and regional planners are starting to declare war on the cul-de-sac:

Early last year, the state of Virginia became the first state to severely limit cul-de-sacs from future development. Similar actions have been taken in Portland Oregon, Austin, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

What they are beginning to realize is that the cul-de-sac street grid uses land inefficiently, discourages walking and biking, and causes an almost complete dependence on driving, with attendant pollution and energy use. Furthermore, town officials are beginning to realize that unconnected streets cost more money to provide services to and force traffic onto increasingly crowded arterial roads, which then, in many cases, need to be widened (more tax money).

First off, there are quite a few obvious benefits to cul-de-sac layouts—the lack of through traffic, for one, makes the area quieter and (presumably) safer for kids to play outside. But many localities now seem to be discovering the less-apparent downsides. Even if you're not very sympathetic to the notion that suburban-dwellers are too reliant on their cars, a number of recent studies suggest that the inefficient road networks created by cul-de-sacs also inflict real costs on residents.

So, for instance, one study of the city of Charlotte found that places where the streets weren't very well connected (thanks, in part, to the heavy use of cul-de-sac) required a lot more fire stations to be built, costing the area more money. Another study found that areas with poor connectivity have much worse congestion—up to 80 percent worse—because the main roads and arteries are more likely to get clogged. So it's not just that cul-de-sac layouts dissuade people from walking or biking; they also seem to be imposing costs on local governments. Though it's unclear whether this backlash is a growing trend or just a few isolated incidents.

(Flickr photo credit: Lins Art)

President Obama visited the White House briefing room today, where he made a statement about bipartisanship and then took several questions from reporters. He had a lot to say about health care, starting with this:

There are some core goals that have to be met.  We've got to control costs, both for families and businesses, but also for our government.  Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending.  We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that.  So that has to be part of a package.

Number two, we've got to deal with insurance abuses that affect millions of Americans who've got health insurance.  And number three, we've got to make health insurance more available to folks in the individual market, as I just mentioned, in California, who are suddenly seeing their premiums go up 39 percent. That applies to the majority of small businesses, as well as sole proprietors. They are struggling.

So I've got these goals.  Now, we have a package, as we work through the differences between the House and the Senate, and we'll put it up on a Web site for all to see over a long period of time, that meets those criteria, meets those goals.  But when I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost.  And I said, great, let me see it.  And I have no interest in doing something that's more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it.

So I'm going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals.  What I will not do, what I don't think makes sense and I don't think the American people want to see, would be another year of partisan wrangling around these issues; another six months or eight months or nine months worth of hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there's a lot of posturing.  Let's get the relevant parties together; let's put the best ideas on the table.  My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don't get every single thing that I want.

But here's the point that I made to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell:  Bipartisanship can't be that I agree to all the things that they believe in or want, and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want, and that's the price of bipartisanship, right?  But that's sometimes the way it gets presented.  Mitch McConnell said something very nice in the meeting about how he supports our goals on nuclear energy and clean coal technology and more drilling to increase oil production.  Well, of course he likes that; that's part of the Republican agenda for energy, which I accept.  And I'm willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway.  But there's got to be some give from their side as well.  That's true on health care; that's true on energy; that's true on financial reform.  That's what I'm hoping gets accomplished at the summit.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs later made clear that Obama would not rule out the use of reconciliation, should compromise between the parties become impossible.

Full transcript of Obama's briefing is at whitehouse.gov. 

In 1994, when they were killing Bill Clinton's health care plan, Republicans promised over and over they just wanted to do it right. Start fresh and pass a real health care plan without all the bad socialist stuff:

"We don't have to do it all this year," [Bob Dole] said in the closing address to committee members. "We don't have to do any of it this year. You know, Congress meets every year.

"I see a lot of bright spots to (acting) next year." ...

"If they come up with something I can live with, I would support it, " said California state party Chairman Tirso del Junco, a surgeon. "But I do not believe that the plans presently on the table would be approved by the American people. To rush this through is bad news."

Of course, the Clinton plan died, and Republicans proceeded to do absolutely squat for the next fifteen years.

This year, when they're doing everything possible to kill President Obama's health care plan, Republicans again insist they just want to start over fresh, have a chance to enact a real bipartisan plan. Why do they say that? This is why:

I don't put much stock in the public's ability to really define "comprehensive" reform. But it's pretty clear that the Republican pretense to really want to do reform, only just not this reform and not right now, is rooted in an understanding that their real position does not reflect public sentiment. There's been an enormous amount of bluster about popular repudiation of the Democratic health care plan. If Republicans truly thought the public shared their beliefs, they wouldn't be talking constantly about starting over and doing it right in a bipartisan fashion.

So how is that informal climate "accord" that came out of Copenhagen last December actually working out? A lot of outside observers seem to assume the summit was a huge flop—after all, it didn't even end with a tangible treaty. I still think the best way to look at Copenhagen is as a work-in-progress that could, with a lot of strengthening, have a positive impact. And here's a new paper from Trevor Houser at the Peterson Institute for International Economics that suggests something similar. It's a keen analysis of the current state of play.

First, some background: On February 1, the U.N. posted a list of countries that have voluntarily pledged to cut (or at least rein in) their greenhouse-gas emissions a certain amount by 2020. So far, 92 countries have made pledges, and they make up 83 percent of the world's emissions. So that's a good first step. Now, Houser looked at what would happen if all of those countries actually did what they're promising (bear in mind, that's hardly a given; the United States, for instance, won't meet its 2020 goals if the Senate refuses to pass a climate bill and also neuters the EPA.)

The end result would be… not too far astray of the mark. The agreed-upon goal, remember, is to keep global temperature increases below 2°C. To do that, climate models suggest that the world's emissions would need to peak at somewhere between 40 and 48 gigatons by 2020. The Copenhagen pledges would put us somewhere between 48 and 51 gigatons—or they would as long as there's international financing for poorer countries and as long as offsets don't get "double-counted" (i.e., a U.S. company pays for tree-planting in Brazil and both countries count that toward their goals). Not easy, but doable.

Houser then tries to model out the likely next steps through 2050 and concludes that, "if countries follow through on their pledges and follow on with more aggressive action, it looks like keeping global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius is still within reach. Of course, the more countries ratchet up mid-term action, the better the chances get. (Also, big caveat: This is all assuming the IPCC consensus on climate science is basically correct. If, instead, the views of scientists like James Hansen are closer to the truth, then we'd actually need much, much deeper emissions cuts—and in that case the world is screwed under Copenhagen.)

So, according to Houser's analysis, countries still need to be more ambitious in their pledges, but the Copenhagen accord has the world (very) roughly on track to meet its own climate goals. Then again, there are so many prickly questions looming—like how we measure and verify that countries like China are actually meeting their targets—that it's way, way too premature to declare this whole process a success.

I've been critical of Rahm Emanuel recently. But this line of attack seems a little unpersuasive:

Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform. ...

The lawmaker said Emanuel misjudged the Senate by focusing on only a few Republicans, citing Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as too narrow a pool.

“In the Senate, you have to anchor in the middle and build out," said the lawmaker.

“They just wanted to win," the source said of Emanuel and other White House strategists. "Their plan was to keep all the Democrats together and work like hell to get Snowe and Collins. The Senate doesn't work that way. You need a radius of 10 to 12 from the other side if you're going to have a shot."

That's what they tried! The White House let Max Baucus spend months trying to woo Charles Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Enzi, in addition to Snowe and Collins. All signaled very strongly that they would not cooperate with any significant reform. In the end, Snowe voted for the Senate Finance Committee bill, then backed away, eventually voting to declare the individual mandate (a cornerstone of the bill she voted for) unconstitutional.

If there's one thing that's clear in retrospect about the health care negotiations, it's that pressure from the GOP leadership and base made any Republican participation in health care reform impossible. Anything that Obama supported was going to be seen as socialism. The Senate bill ended up more conservative than the bipartisan Dole-Baker-Daschle proposal. It's like Romneycare, the plan that enjoys the continued support of Scott Brown, but with delivery reforms to control costs. And they see it  as socialism. It's astonishing to me that there are Democrats who think the answer to this problem would be to try to enlist the support of Republicans even more conservative than the ones who spurned them.

Where do sea serpents come from? Legend and myth, of course. But many scientists think the giant oarfish, which can grow up to 55 feet in length, has been the main inspiration for all those myths over the years. A few oarfish corpses in various unsavory states have washed up on shore over the years, including a 16-footer that was the inspiration for this Harper's Weekly sketch titled "Monsters of the Sea." But no one's ever seen an oarfish swimming in the wild, at least until now. Here's the video:

The fish was recently caught swimming beneath a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico—the camera was provided by oil companies and run by marine scientists. The collaboration, appropriately enough, is called the Serpent project.

George Packer has taken some heat for mourning the way new media have crowded out time for books:

Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle. I’m sure Ambinder still reads books when he’s not on vacation, but it didn’t occur to him to include them in his account, and I’d guess that this is because they’re not a central part of his reading life.

And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took!

Speaking for the techno-utopian set, Matthew Yglesias fires back:

A person who chose to never read a single piece of post-1960 fiction could still live a rich and full life. He could even adopt a sneering attitude toward people who insisted on reading new novels. And people who subscribe to cable television (later: DVRs). And people who buy VCRs (later: DVD players). And people who read blogs (later: Twitter feeds). But what does it really amount to? To take advantage of new opportunities to do new things means, by definition, to reduce the extent to which one takes advantage of old opportunities to do old things. One shouldn’t deny that the losses involved are real—of course they are—but simply point out that it’s unavoidable. To say, “aha! this is the thing—this Twitter, these blogs—that’s crowded books out of my life” is a kind of confusion. Life is positively full of these little time-crunches. The fact that something displaces something of value doesn’t mean that it has no value, it just means that it’s new. To displace old things is in the nature of new things, and to cite the fact of displacement as the problem with the new thing really is just to object to novelty.

Yglesias is missing Packer's point. Packer is not making a version of the complaint that "nobody listens to records anymore and records are really cool." He's saying that he and many of his friends are reading fewer books and are unhappy about that fact. People who have DVRs don't complain about the fact that they don't watch their VCR anymore. Their unhappiness suggests that something more is going on here than people substituting a newer and better technology for an older one.

Packer is suggesting two factors at work. First, there's so much information to keep up with, as emails and blog posts and Twitter messages keep flying in, that people find themselves on an information treadmill they can't get off. Second, the constant imbibing of this information can alter our mental habits in such a way as to make long-form reading more difficult even when we do have the time. That's the point Packer is making when he says that he pulled out a volume of Kierkegaard and couldn't believe he had once been able to immerse himself in it. Maybe twentysomethings have managed to avoid this. Packer's complaint rings true to me.

Marc Ambinder:

"If the primaries were this year, I suspect she'd be nominated," a senior adviser to one of Sarah Palin's potential rivals confides.

One the one hand, Palin is less likely than any of the plausible Republican alternatives to beat President Obama in 2012. On the other hand, if conditions are bad enough -- say, persistently high unemployment -- even Palin could win. And that could be, to put it mildly, a historical disaster.

 The Saints’ victory celebration continues today as Coach Sean Payton, Drew Brees, and his teammates get feted at the Saints Super Bowl parade in New Orleans. The Saints’ remarkable win Sunday has literally served as New Orleanians’ proud cry to the nation: We are back!

But, did you know that last Saturday they also elected a new mayor?

Lost in all of the euphoria is another pivotal moment for the city. Mitch Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor, won the mayoral seat in a landslide, capturing the support of two-thirds of the city’s voters, thus avoiding a run-off among five other candidates. He won all but one of the city’s precincts and attracted the vast majority of the city’s black voters. Landrieu will serve as the New Orleans’ first white mayor since his father held the perch 36 years ago.

Perhaps some of the recent jubilation (or bead throwing) comes from the sheer relief that the Nagin era is over. Yet just because Nagin has set the bar so low doesn’t mean that Landrieu doesn’t have the job cut out for him.

The mayor-elect confronts two major tasks when he assumes office in May.

First, Landrieu will need to restore confidence in city government and city services. Like all new mayors, he must get “the basics” right, such as providing quality schools, safe streets, and the efficient delivery of public services. Without these, businesses and families will choose to locate elsewhere and, in New Orleans, patience for such basic functions is wearing thin. To his credit, Landrieu has already signaled that reducing violent crime and restoring public safety will be one of his first priorities in office.

Second, Landrieu will need to unify the city around a common, forward-learning vision and action agenda for New Orleans that goes beyond disaster recovery and puts the city and region on a path to long-term prosperity.

At the core, the city’s ultimate turnaround rests less on how many school roofs have finally been fixed or how many water and sewer lines have been repaired since Katrina. Instead, Landrieu must make sure that all of the tireless rebuilding efforts, hundreds of citizen meetings, and billions of investments over the last five years are truly moving New Orleans toward a future that is more promising than it was before the storm. This means building a more diverse, export-oriented, and innovation-fueled economy with good-paying jobs (beyond the rebuilding-related industries that are bootstrapping its economy now). It means improving opportunities for lower-income families by providing quality neighborhoods and strong cradle-to-career pathways that do not replicate recent decades of extreme poverty. And he should push for meaningful progress on coastal protection and restoration so that families and businesses can reside safely and sustainably in greater New Orleans for generations to come.

These are difficult goals and they need to be matched with practical strategies and outcomes. Further, Landrieu cannot achieve these goals alone. To be effective, he must harness the energies of citizen and civic groups, leverage the goodwill of private and philanthropic partners, and build bridges with federal, state and local governments, including his own city council and neighboring parish leaders.

In conversations prior to the election, I heard Landrieu supporters argue that he “gets” what the job is, and he has the skills and experience to build such critical partnerships.

Let’s hope he proves them right. When Saints fever fades, all eyes will be on Landrieu to channel all that overflowing New Orleans pride and fully demonstrate that, indeed, the Big Easy is back.

Former Dick Cheney aid Cesar Conda has a post at National Review announcing that he has switched his loyalties in the Florida Senate race from Charlie Crist, once seen as the prohibitive favorite, to Marco Rubio, conservative darling and now all-but-inevitable Republican nominee:

Last May, I wrote about why I thought Florida governor Charlie Crist was an acceptable fiscal conservative (the Cato Institute had given him an "A" on its Fiscal Policy Report Card) and why I believed he gave Republicans the best chance to retain Florida's U.S. Senate seat.  Even though I was chided by fellow conservatives for saying something favorable about the governor, who had embraced Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus package (which by the way has failed to reduce unemployment), I believed that a more important goal was to stop the Democrats from strengthening their filibuster-proof Senate majority.  I subsequently donated to Crist's Senate campaign and even met with him once to discuss tax- and budget-policy ideas.

But since then, I've changed my mind and made the switch to Marco Rubio.  For one thing, Governor Crist's fiscal-responsibility score has fallen.  According to Cato's Chris Edwards in an October e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times:  "But as the report's author, I am concerned that the governor has fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse since the report was written in mid-2008. In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal 'stimulus' money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases." But more important, I had a chance to meet with Rubio right before Christmas. He struck me as someone who was geniunely interested in nitty-gritty of public policy; a true policy wonk who had championed 100 reform ideas when he was the Speaker of the Florida house.

Charlie Crist is not going to have a lot of Republican friends left. My favorite part of this post, aside from the rank opportunism -- does anybody think they'd be reading this if Crist still led by fifty points? -- is the description of Rubio as a "true policy wonk." Here's an example of the true wonk applying his great intellect to one of the issues of the day:

Earlier this week, I spoke out against President Obama’s wrongheaded decision to place an onerous and punitive new tax on the financial institutions Americans rely on to loan them money to buy homes, safeguard their money, and fund their businesses. Since then, I have been subjected to vicious attacks from Democratic party operatives, liberal bloggers, and even some in the media. Tired old stories long ago proven meritless were rehashed with new sinister headlines. Even the bank that gave me a line of credit on my home was dragged into this.

This is life in Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s America, where not only is free enterprise attacked, but so too is anyone who dares to defend it. ...

President Obama’s bank tax is about finding new ways for the Democrats who control Congress to confiscate more money to pay for their big-government takeover. It won’t recoup money for the taxpayer because taxpayers will ultimately pay for this tax in the form of higher costs of banking, lost jobs, and a freeze of economic activity. This tax is a cynical and intellectually lazy attempt at pitting the American people against American enterprise in the hopes that we will all forget about this president’s and this Congress’s failures in addressing job losses, reckless spending, and soaring debt.

What a policy wonk! It's such a loss for the world that he's running for public office rather than devising brilliant new insights as chairman of the Harvard Economics department or something.