Daschle dissembles, aided and abbetted by Ezra Klein

Tom Daschle was interviewed by Ezra Klein today and the Washington Post blogger gave the former Majority Leader an opportunity to defend himself against attacks concerning his recent statements on a public healthcare plan,

You made headlines the other day for dismissing the need for a public plan. Want to talk a bit more on that?

I don't know where that came from. We've been pushing back on that all day. I didn't say that. I have said emphatically I support a public plan. A Medicare-for-all public plan. Any federal plan. For all the reasons that have been made for years. It's important for cost, for choice, for competition, for popularity. I strongly support it.

What I did say is that I'm willing to compromise on most things to bring the package across the line. The plan we agreed to yesterday was that states could offer public plans with a federal fall back. That's not my first, second, or third choice. But given the concessions my colleagues made on universal coverage and an employer mandate and everything else, that's the essence of compromise.

First things first, Ezra's question itself contains a factual innacuracy that (intentional or not) allows Daschle to avoid the real substantive issue. Daschle didn't dismiss the need for a public plan, he dismissed the legislative viability of a public plan. There is a very big difference and thanks to Klein's bad question Daschle is able to avoid engaging with actual issue and instead gets to swat down a Klein created straw-man.

As Klein himself noted today, a public plan is hugely popular. The hangup is purely political and, as Ezra notes in yet another post today, the political problem lies in the United States Senate.

I'm not a professional journalist but it seems to me that if I had an interview with the former Majority Leader of the United States Senate days after he said that the crucial component of the healthcare reform agenda was politically untenable I might ask him specifically about the politics of the situation. I also would ask him how he thought that standing with Bob Dole and publicly proclaiming that a public plan (again - a plan Daschle claims to support) is dead would impact the political dynamics of the debate?

But Ezra didn't do any of that, instead he fumbled the question and allowed Daschle to dissemble and never explain why he, Daschle, thought publicly undermining a hugely popular and entirely neccessary policy proposal (that he claims to support) was a good idea.