If health care reform weren't such an enormous deal, people would be paying more attention to the sweeping student loan reform that's being attached to it and could pass on the same vote. It's a pretty simple issue, though opponents do their best to muck it up.

This is the way it happens.

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver
(Library of America, 1019 pp., $40)
 

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
By Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, 578 pp., $35)

In the summer of 1984, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and his wife traveled to the remote coastal town of Port Angeles, Washington, to visit Raymond Carver in the glass-walled “Sky House,” overlooking the ocean, which he shared with his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. It was more of a pilgrimage than a social call. Murakami, who had run a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking up writing six years earlier at the age of twenty-nine, admired Carver more than any other writer. Although they had never met, he considered Carver “the most valuable teacher I had.” Murakami had embarked on the epic task of translating all of Carver’s writings--stories, poems, essays--into Japanese. He had somehow concluded that Carver must be “thin and delicate,” and was surprised by his massive shoulders and big hands. As Carver sipped black tea instead of the alcohol he had sworn off after thirty years of dangerously heavy drinking, Murakami felt that his idol “sat on the sofa with his body crouched up as if to say that he had never intended to get so big.”

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid "Negro Dialect" furor the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He'll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.

On a day normally devoted to examining the past, there's one bit of news affecting the political future.  The Democratic Change Commission, set up during last year's Democratic National Convention to deal with accumulated grievances about the presidential nominating process, forwarded its recommendations to the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee.  In an extraordinarily unsurprising move, the commission recommended killing the independent voting status of convention superdele

WASHINGTON -- The most surprising and disappointing aspect of our politics is how little pushback there has been against the vile, extremist rhetoric that has characterized such a large part of the anti-Obama movement.

President Obama's administration has largely ignored those accusing him of "fascism" and "communism," presumably believing that restraint in defense of dignity is no vice. 

As its "Arena" question to pundits this morning, Politico has "Obama's Charisma: Where Did He Leave it?"

The implication seems to be--and I feel as though I've heard a variation on this question asked not infrequently of late--that Obama was such a dazzling, inspirational, transformational campaigner that it's hard to fathom where this wonky, chilly, pathologically measured grind of a president came from.

The Connecticut Senator says that President Obama didn't favor a public plan when he ran for president:

It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.

... by quoting Talladega Nights at an Iowa GOP fundraiser:

Thank you, Lord, for my red-hot, smokin’ wife.

I know T-Paw is pushing his "regular guy" appeal as he positions himself for 2012, but this seems rather to overshoot the mark. No word on whether he also promised to come at Barack Obama "like a spider monkey."

When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.

Via Ben Smith, Radio Iowa reports that Christie Vilsack--wife of the guy currently responsible for grading your meat--m

From today's Times: 

Despite the expansion of coverage at a cost of $829 billion over 10 years, the budget office said 25 million people — about one-third of them illegal immigrants — would still be uninsured in 2019. ...

So, like a lot of people on the left and center-left (and, presumably, a fairly overwhelming majority of Americans), I’m pretty disappointed that the Senate Finance Committee took an axe to the public option yesterday.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus says he will release a health care bill* very soon, maybe in the next 24 hours. And we already have a pretty good idea what it will look like, thanks to an outline Baucus has distributed to the Gang of Six--the bipartisan group with which he’s been trying to hammer out a compromise.

Sources inside the Finance Committee say that the formal bill will look a lot like that proposal, with some minor modifications. Of the three Republicans engaged in those discussions, only Maine Senator Olympia Snowe seems likely embrace the proposal, although one can never be entirely sure about what Iowa's Charles Grassley will do--or how he'll decide to tell the world. (I'm hoping for a tweet: "Sorry MAx. NoDEATH panel 4 me.")

Regardless of which Republicans sign on, affordability is going to be a major source of controversy, both within the Finance Committee and outside of it. Relative to both the bills that three House committees approved and the one that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed, Baucus’s proposal is less generous. It offers less financial assistance--and would not guarantee that plans offer as much protection from medical expenses.

But does that mean it's actually inadequate?

To address this very question, Finance Committee staff last week distributed a memo outlining the proposal’s effects. The key table, which appears on the last page and is reproduced below,

Now that Chris Dodd has decided to keep his chairmanship of the Senate banking committee, it looks like Tom Harkin will leave his agriculture post to go take Ted Kennedy's former spot atop the HELP committee. To the dismay of a lot of food-policy reformers, this means the more conservative Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will be next in line for the Ag Committee gavel (there are more senior members on that committee, but they all have other, more powerful chairmanships already).

It's not unreasonable to ask if this will really make a big difference as far as agricultural policy's concerned. After all, Harkin was a corn man from Iowa who always had a kind word for Monsanto; the farm bill during his tenure was as subsidy-laden as ever, and, more recently, he was praising House Ag Chair Collin Peterson's extortionist moves on climate-change legislation, even suggesting that Peterson didn't go far enough in his attempts to immunize farmers from the effects of the bill. How much worse could Lincoln be?

'We should not have a government plan that will pull the plug on grandma." That's not Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin talking. That's Charles Grassley, the supposedly respectable Republican senator from Iowa, speaking before a town hall in August. Grassley knows better, of course. As the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, he's been immersed in the issue for months. And there's nothing in the bills moving through Congress that would encourage, let alone force, people to end life-sustaining treatment for their loved ones or themselves.

"It's a rough patch I'm going through," says Chris Dodd. How rough? Not long ago, Dodd entertained dreams of ascending to the White House. He moved his family to Iowa in 2007 and enrolled his daughter in a Des Moines public school, all in the hope of winning the state's caucus. He gave solid (if never spectacular) performances in debates while fund-raising prodigiously. And, though he didn't vault into the top tier of candidates, he managed to end his bid for the presidency with his long-standing reputation as a serious player in Democratic politics basically intact.

A few quick reactions to today's excellent news from Iowa:

Political prediction markets are usually pretty boring during electoral off-years.