Jon Cohn For President

Jon Cohn is too modest to plug his own appearance last night on the Colbert Show, so I'll do it for him. The health care debate in this country has become completely screwball. To the right wing and their covert allies in the insurance industry, it's about death panels. To the Washington Post editorial page, it is entirely about how big the deficit will be in 2015. But it's not about that: it's about the anxieties and insecurities that Americans feel when they imagine themselves or one of their family members--or their friends or neighbors--getting sick and not being able to afford the necessary treatment. That can be because they lost their job or because they have an insurance plan (like the one certain people I know have) that questions every claim or because they never had insurance in the first place. Jon Cohn understands these anxieties, and during the Colbert Report last night, he made the case for national health care reform better than I have heard any of the Democrats in Congress or the administration make it. Watch the segment.

--John B. Judis