The New York Times’ Patrick Healy reports that former governor Mario Cuomo writes a regular memo to friends called “the Update” offering his take on the political scene (sounds like a blog):
The Update reads like a set of talking points for the most serious of policy wonk Cassandras who believe that politicians are ignoring looming threats at the nation’s peril: Iraq, health care, Medicare and Medicaid, the Middle East, global warming, immigration, trade and budget deficits, and so on.
Look, this is preposterous. The Democratic presidential candidates each have a global warming proposal. What’s more, they all actually have very similar proposals, featuring different quantitative degrees of ambitiousness in terms of where they want to set the carbon cap in a cap-and-trade system. The issue is simply that as we’re seeing with energy legislation currently pending in the congress that the existence of conservative legislators makes it difficult to pass these plans. Similarly, you may not like the Democratic contenders’ plans for Iraq (I’m not thrilled myself), but they definitely exist. Nor is anyone ignoring immigration. Indeed, it’s been consuming the Senate recently.
Healy remarks that “The memo also reads like it could’ve been written by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City.” This is true, but they sound the same because the two of them are basically peddling the same B.S.