Brownback gone -- several more to go

Brownback is out, and it's about time. He had been heavily hyped in some corners as a dark-horse candidate that could electrify the religious right and cause Christians to pour millions into his campaign.

That hardly proved to be the case, to say the least. In fact, the only thing that stood between Brownback and being the dullest knife in the drawer was Tommy Thompson, and when the latter dropped out after the Iowa straw poll, Brownback stood out as the weakest of the lot. Yes, Tancredo and Hunter are certainly more marginal, but each has some charisma and personal appeal.

Brownback is said to be aiming at a run for the governor's office in Kansas. Sounds like a good project for him, and we wish him well.

Hunter and Tancredo surely have to go soon, as well -- they are just dividing the conservative vote further than it already is.

Paul should stay in for the reasons we have detailed before, and Huckabee is no longer a second-tier candidate -- at the very least he is just as "first tier" as John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Moving on with SCHIP

Dave Budge did the heavy lifting of responding to Jay at LITW, so there isn't much to add there.

Dave states that 85% or so of people with insurance are either "satisfied or very satisfied with their coverage." That probably isn't terribly off.

Of course, everyone would always like to have more and better coverage while paying less for it. But most people also know that you don't get something for nothing.

And reading Ed Kemmick today, we are reminded that there is by no means agreement in Canada on whether that country's system actually provides what it claims to provide by comparison with the American system.

The observations made by the Canadian blogger Ed cites are backed up by our own anecdotal observations based on former Canadians with chronic health problems who have moved to the U.S. -- namely that they discovered that they were getting significantly inattentive care for those chronic diseases back in Canada, and that in moving from a major metropolitan area in Canada to lowly Billings, MT and coming under private American insurance, their management of those chronic diseases and attention to preventing complications improved dramatically.

But back to SCHIP: What is interesting is that even though the Presidential veto was sustained in the House, as everyone knew it would be, we have our senior Senator in denial:

"This fight is so far from over. The fat lady isn't even warming up," Baucus said. "It just means we need to regroup and bring more people to the table. It means we need to tweak the bill slightly while making sure it does what we need it to do, cover more uninsured kids."

Tweaking it slightly?

Somehow we doubt that that will cut it -- unless the real point is to make more political hay, rather than to pass a working SCHIP bill.

Which may very well be the case.