Political Excitement

I noticed last week that I had not found much commentary worth marking in my daily reading of the news and the many blogs I follow. I went on vacation for a couple of days so that I read nothing for nearly 4 days. When I got back I was surprised at the number of things I found worth reading. If I didn’t know better I would think that I had lowered my standards on what was worth reading during my break. The fact is that for some reason there was just an unusual amount of very good commentary over the weekend.

There were two major topics, plus some good commentary that I will cover in my upcoming Fourth of July post.

One topic that I saw a lot of commentary about was immigration reform. This makes sense because it was being debated (and eventually killed) in the Senate. There were two angles of discussion there. One was about what bad legislation it would have been. The second was what we can learn about the changing face of politics in our connected world.

One particularly good post came from Steve Urquhart, who is both blogger and politician. He takes this "victory of the people" and reminds those who have worked so hard to defeat the bill that there is still work to be done, and that part of that work is to actively help legislators navigate in the new, and increasingly connected world by "embracing Senators who engage directly with the people." The second thing that the victors need to do is foster "a productive, result-oriented dialogue on immigration."

The second common topic surprised me. It was government provided health insurance . The surprise was not the topic, which is only going to get more air time as the 2008 elections heat up (only 16 months to go). What surprised me was that up until now everything I have read on the topic has amounted to varying degrees of "let’s make it happen." Suddenly I have multiple independent sources taking the time to argue why it’s not such a good idea.