Running the executive bureaucracy is hard enough without trying to navigate between two competing power poles. In the past, strong vice-presidents have, for that reason, been sidelined and marginalized, as Kennedy did to Johnson, and as Johnson did to Humphrey. It's not that their counsel wasn't potentially valuable, but that the top priority for the president was asserting the primacy of his own authority, and that meant going further than one might have wanted in locking away his vice-president. That sort of thing is not an effective use of White House resources or talent, and it's not a desirable dynamic in the executive branch. And though this doesn't often get a lot of attention, a smoothly functioning executive branch will be crucial to the success of the next president's agenda.

In one of the more enjoyable writing experiences I've had of late, I've got the cover in this month's Columbia Journalism Review recounting my month with the Amazon Kindle and what it suggests about the future of reading:

I’m not sure exactly what I expected from my month with the Kindle. Maybe for some inquisitive older gentleman, possibly wearing wire glasses and a tweed blazer, to sidle up and say, “Excuse me, I hate to bother you while you’re reading, but do you really think that can replace the book?” Or possibly for a librarian to berate me. In any case, it didn’t happen. In fact, nobody noticed at all. Though reading the Kindle felt like a courageous betrayal of every word written since the moment papyrus gave way to paper, it turns out that looking at words on tiny screens in public places is far too common to attract attention. Indeed, the only person who demonstrated a heightened awareness of nearby reading habits was me. Suddenly everyone seemed to be staring at a laptop or scrolling through a BlackBerry or searching for songs on an iPod or texting on a flip phone. The Kindle is far less the start of a revolution than the codification of one. It’s a declaration of war long after most of the contested lands have been conquered.[...]

Let me be clear: though the Kindle has some advantages over traditional books, for the moment, I’d stick with the low-tech option. The problem is that the Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the experience of reading a book. In this way, the Kindle occasionally comes off as if Ford, failing to make the conceptual leap to the car, had instead built a motorized horse. Sure, there would be some advantages: the robo-steed would never grow tired, and could be outfitted with more plush seating. But horses are pretty good at being horses. And books, like horses, have evolved to maximize their advantages.

The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from John Pastor.

The problem is, it also obscures the actual obstacles to health reform. There's a very simple reason I spend more time reporting on the Wyden bill and the presidential offerings than HR-676: HR-676 isn't going to pass. Not in any set of circumstances we can currently imagine, or any congressional make-up we can currently expect. Steve talks a lot about how it's got broad cosponsorship from progressives in the House, but health care lives or dies in the Senate. Which is why the problem that animates my work has changed. It used to be why the French health care system was better than the American incarnation, because frankly, I feel most sure of myself on that ground, and it's something I enjoy writing about. But over time, I realized that though that sort of commentary was fun for me, it was beside the point when it came to health reform. There, exactly one question matters: How do you get to 60 in the Senate?

The reason I don't spend much time on HR-676 is that one has ever explained to me how you do it with that bill. Forget the 4-6 Republicans you'd need even in the unlikely case of full Democratic unanimity after an election in which Democrats gain 3-5 Senate seats. First tell me how you get 16 of the following 16 Democratic moderate-to-conservative politicians onto a single payer health care plan: Mark Pryor, Blanche Lincoln, Dianne Feinstein, Ken Salazar, Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Jeff Bingaman, Kent Conrad, Robert Byrd, Tim Johnson, and probably Mark Warner. Then, after you do that, tell me how you get three of the following three "dealmaker" Republicans: Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter. And then tell me how you get two or so of the following five dealmaker economic conservatives (cause you're not going to get the straight party hacks): Bob Bennett, Chuck Grassley, Lamar Alexander, John Sununu, and George Voinovich.

Defined as liberal and conservative visions, the two appear in opposition. But traditionally, they've often been unified (think Ross Perot, or Pat Buchanan, or, more dangerously, George Wallace), and Clinton's past few weeks on the trails have seen her playing up a moderate form of economic populism and a weak form of cultural populism simultaneously. Chait is right to be annoyed with the anti-intellectualism that infected her gas tax holiday rhetoric and right to recoil from her comments touting support among "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," but that's been as far as she's gone into cultural populism, and I'm willing to chalk the latter up as a Kinsleyan gaffe (after all, the press corps believes that too: Chait's colleague John Judis has often fretted over Obama's apparent weakness among the white working class). As it is, Clinton's been a much more consistent economic populist throughout the campaign -- a fact reflected by her domestic policy proposals -- and I don't think it necessary nor useful to take that from her. Frankly, Obama would probably have had less trouble winning the nomination had his instincts pushed him in a similar direction from the start.

But Clinton's populism was a vote-getting device, and aside from that one comment about her support among white Americans, never dipped particularly deeply into the more vicious strains of cultural populism.

Clinton, after all, made an informed decision: Given low potential odds of winning the nomination, she thought it worthwhile to take out loans of approximately $11 million in order to maximize her chance for victory. It emphasized her intense commitment to her campaign, given that $11 million was a substantial sum of money to potentially lose. If it's repaid as some sort of concession prize, that suggests there was no real financial risk at all, and future trailing candidates should feel free to borrow epic sums that draw out bruising campaigns, secure in the knowledge that they can leverage their eventual withdrawal to force the winning campaign to cover their debt. It's the Bear Stearns theory of campaign financing, and it doesn't seem like something that should be encouraged.

Further, on a level of basic equity, millions of people in this country take out unwise loans on unlikely schemes and no one covers their debt. Given that that's exactly the sort of economic unfairness Clinton has spent the last few months condemning, it seems peculiar for her to now avail herself of those opportunities. If Clinton said she would not drop out unless Obama swore to send a health care bill to Congress within his first 100 days, I'd have immense respect for that. But a repayment of debt she knowingly entered into? That's not how this is supposed to work.

Vermonstrous writes, "ambulance fees. DC has 'em. Alexandria and Arlington have 'em. Montgomery is considering them. Supporters of these fees say they are only charged to those whose insurance pays -- functionally giving the jurisdictions free money from insurance companies. They also say the fees haven't discouraged people from calling 911. How they can say, on one hand, that taxes and fees -- on cigarettes, environmental impact and the like -- can change behavior while at the same time arguing that ambulance fees do no such thing is beyond me. What say you?"

I'm going to put aside the issue of whether I think ambulance fees are a good idea or not (I haven't thought about it much nor read the relevant literature) and simply explain why the fees don't discourage 911 calls. Basically, there are two reasons, and they demonstrate something important about health care:

1) We're insulated from health care costs. To take the cigarette example, imagine if your work paid for your cigarettes. In fact, you never even saw the price tag on the pack. Rather, you went in, flashed your smoker's coverage card, and got your cancer sticks. Would you care if the legislature raised prices a dollar a pack? Of course not. You don't really see how you're paying. Of course, in the end, you are paying, because your employer is taking that money out of your wages or passing it in to consumers. But that's very indirect, or at least feels very indirect. In the short-term, the smokes might as well be free. So too with ambulances, and ambulance costs, for folks with insurance. While the uninsured may be somewhat price sensitive, for the insured, calling an ambulance doesn't much change their insurance bill. So why not make the call? After all, your insurer is paying for it.

2) You don't comparison shop from a hospital gurney. In any economic transaction, the consumer's leverage is her ability to walk out of the store and either go without the good or find a better price somewhere else. Consumers don't have that distance when pain is lancing through their chest and every moment of delay may mean the death of more heart muscle. Too much delay could mean brain damage, or even death. When those are the stakes and the time constraints, you don't have the ability to not call the ambulance. You don't have the time to comparison shop. Folks having a health emergency go to the doctor first and figure out the pricing later. A good credit rating, after all, isn't much good if you're dead.

So this stuff is increasing. The "all debt as a share of income" number is particularly worrying, as it's increased as much in the 2000-2005 period as in the 1979-2000 period. Megan might say it's all a function of asset bubbles, but economists I've talked to say the upper-bound estimate for the impact of asset market bubbles is half of the decline in the savings rate. Significant, but not, on its own, the whole story. So something is going on here. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Michael Mandel, the chief economist at Business Week, calls the following graphic "the world's scariest chart," and while I don't think it quite compares to this one, it's not far off:

According to Mandel, the difference between the debt load we've seen and the debt load we might expect is $3 trillion dollars -- that's a lot of financial obligation weighing down our households, and we've only begun to see the effects. Im not one who believes our middle class is finished, but I wouldn't downplay the problems we're likely to face as these debts begin to come due.

Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)

Fantastic.

I wouldn't take small differences as particularly indicative. For instance, I'd argue for Obama's superiority on economic issues, but the difference isn't to be found in a slight variation in word count. What is interesting are the areas where Obama actually has a position, or has felt the need to articulate a position, but McCain hasn't. They are: Civil rights, disabilities, faith issues, family issues (defined by his staff as work-life balance, kid credits, education, and similarly oriented ideas), poverty reduction, rural concerns, seniors and Social Security, service, and technology. Similarly fascinating are the areas where McCain clearly felt the need to articulate a position, but from the word count, it's clear that he doesn't actually have one. This category includes education and the environment.

The issue here is not that John McCain, in any and all circumstances, would refuse to sign or support education legislation. It's that he appears to have no strong opinions on it, has not seen fit to really offer voters a guide to positions, and so will probably fall under the spell of whichever adviser is nearest. That's not really a good thing given that we don't yet know who would get which desk in a McCain White House. Similarly, McCain's total inattention to poverty issues is a pretty clear guide of how high a priority he'd place on poverty reduction, and the same goes for civil rights and disabilities concerns. Additionally, the fact that his tax and health care plans stand no earthly chance of passing suggest he's not terribly serious on either of those issues, either, and is using them as a form of political positioning rather than an accurate guide to his policy agenda. So his plans look pretty slim. In 2000, at least, he was running on a campaign finance tear. You'll notice that doesn't appear on his site now. Frankly, aside from start wars, it's a bit unclear what John McCain wants to do as president.