Rahm: Delay Health Care

Rahm Emanuel’s announcement in The New York Times that congressional Democrats should drop health-care reform to fourth on their list of priorities has some bloggers clucking—and others calling for his scalp. Ezra Klein writes, “The longer this takes, the less likely it is to happen. And Emanuel just said that the administration's preference is to let it take longer. If I were a doctor, I'd downgrade health care's prognosis considerably atop this evidence.” Jonathan Chait, meanwhile, writes, “Either Obama doesn't know what he wants to do, and his deputies are spreading conflicting stories in order to see what takes, in which case he needs to make up his mind pronto. Or else he wants to do what he says he wants to do, but his chief of staff is out there subverting his agenda and making Congress doubt his seriousness, in which case Obama needs to shut up Emanuel or fire him.”