Health. Care.

.

The passion Elizabeth Edwards brings to the subject of health care is undeniable. Many of us share that passion because, like her, our family travels the cancer road. And in so doing, we experience, either directly or through our loved ones, the exquisite toll that road extracts.

We know what it means to deal with health care providers, even at their best, and with the frustrations of insurance coverages, or lack of coverages. And even the Rube Goldbergian state of the business side of the health care industry these days. Makes those Hillary Care mocking diagrams the Republicans pushed back then look like a straight-line walk in the park compared to the cumbersome and convoluted and maze-like contraptions the Republican-controlled Congress provided over the years since 1994.

So I follow with interest Elizabeth's take on the candidates and their health care programs.

Without getting into the fine points of those programs, however, because me weary head spins in the doing, I'm of a mind that style matters as much as substance in this argument. Here's why.

No health care program at all will be effective if it can't get through the Congress. Carl Bernstein addressed this issue on the Imus Show this morning [no link avail yet] in making the point that the health care plan—and the way Hillary shepherded it—not only did not pass muster with the Congress, it was also, in Bernstein's opinion, a significant if not the major, cause of the Democrats' loss of the Congress to Newtster and the Republicans.

I think we're seeing deja voodoo all over again in this campaign. All the detailed nuanced planning in the world won't make a hill of beans of difference if it can't be passed. And that's where I may be diverging from Elizabeth Edwards' take. Because I'm seein' same ol', same ol' from 2/3 of the remaining candidates.

My personal candidate support is not based on a single issue, important as it is, but the overarching arc of what each of the three remaining candidates offer in terms of style as well as substance. Because it's going to take style—a cool kind of style, methinks—to lead the people in getting this car that is America back out of the muck in the ditch, cleaned up, tuned up, and back on the road.

And there's only one place I'm seeing that right now, with a candidate who coolly tells his audience that he has expectations of them, as well as himself. A candidate who refuses to let his opponents or the media frame him as a single issue candidate. And the audience responds to that, because they—we—are ready for expectations. Young and old, we're not cowering under our school desks anymore, and we're ready to do better.