Second, they don't care about policy.  Obama must be right about everything because he's their guy.

What's particularly noxious about the blogs signing on to this line of attack is that most participants on blogs will have the means to buy insurance under either plan.  What they are doing is supporting Obama's efforts to scare lower income, working class folks about Hillary's plan by making it sound like she's going to make them buy something expensive and if they can't, she's going to throw them in jail or something.  If the Republicans were doing this, it would be unacceptable.  But because it's Obama, it's perfectly fine.  

This is a very personal issue for me and my family, and in a city with the highest health care costs in the country.  My insurance costs have soared, and the need for insurance has pushed one of my kids with a chronic health condition out of college too soon -- where we have seen that there just are so few jobs with good insurance coverage, and it has meant having her move back home to be able to afford to cover her, too.

I'm back to Wes Clark for Clinton's VP.  

But the threat to universal healthcare is real.  As I listened last night, I think Obama's plan isn't universal and he knows it and what he'd do to correct it isn't very different from what Clinton would do.  He's hoping - there's that word - that everyone will buy it.  If they don't, then he admitted there could be a problem.  How would he solve that problem?  Possibly by forcing folks who end up in the emergency room, but don't have insurance, to pay back premiums.  That sounds a lot like either a mandate or a penalty meant to ensure people buy insurance.

Well Obama and Clinton's plans would essentially be the same for you - both would provide ways for you to get it.

• It's not true.  While Clinton does include mandates there are also subsidies and cost controls, there is no reason to believe people will be forced to buy something they cannot afford.

•  It is not true because Obama has mandates in his plan for children and has admitted he might need to add some sort of penalty to get universality of healthcare.  Last night he specifically said that if not enough young and healthy people participate he would consider charging uninsured folks who seek emergency room treatment back premiums on insurance.  He has said other places he would consider a mandate.

•  The mailer is designed to pray on the fears of poor and working class people, those who worry about affordability, and make them oppose Clinton's universal healthcare plan.  Think about that, it's using fear to get the very people who most need and would most benefit from Clinton's plan (or even Obama's plan) to oppose that plan.  Remember Obama talking about how Reagan got people to vote against their economic interests?  Well, this is one way Republicans did that - by misrepresenting democratic proposals and scaring the crap out of people.  That's exactly what this is.  It isn't a policy difference, it's fear mongering.  And it's raising fears about universal healthcare (both Clinton and Obama's plans have mandates and, in any event, Clinton is still the likely nominee even if Obama has closed the gap).

•  Obama is a hypocrite. Obama is running the exact same campaign against Clinton's universal healthcare plan that the insurance industry did in the 1990s.  Hell, as Ezra Klein points out, these folks are almost Harry and Louise clones.  So after Obama blames Clinton for the failure of universal healthcare and promises he can make it happen, he adopts the exact same attack on her plan that the industry used to kill universal healthcare in the 1990s.  And this is supposed to make me think Obama is better on universal healthcare? Or that he wants to turn the page on the politics of the 1990s?  He's mimicking the politics of the 1990s.

• If you think this won't comeback to haunt universal healthcare efforts, you're crazy.  He's basically saying the industry's attacks in the 1990s were right.  They are going to use those same attacks against universal healthcare again - regardless of who is President, Clinton or Obama - only now, Obama has already admitted they're right.

The most glaring is that it hearkens back to the imagery and messaging that was used by the republicans to destroy health care reform outright in the early 90's. Seriously. Check out the Ezra Klein post linked above -- it has a direct comparison between the two ads. That's not a method of messaging on health care that is, we'll say, helpful to pushing change now.

The second problem is broader, and is what Krugman has been trying to get at for a long time. If Obama tries to bring down Clinton's plan by attacking the whole concept of mandates, what he's doing is taking the mandate option entirely out of the realm of political acceptability. The fact is, Obama has mandates, too -- he has them for children, and last night he tried to come up with options for penalizing people who didn't buy in but who show up at the ER, which is essentially a mandate. He has to do this because when he insists that coverage will be available to everybody regardless of preexisting conditions, he absolutely needs the younger and healthier folks out there to also join up to make the numbers work. He's hoping they will, but if they don't, he is quickly going to find -- and I believe that he's talked about this himself, but I'm not sure of a link -- that he needs some sort of formal mandate so that more healthy people are paying in than sick people taking out. He's hobbling his own ability to do this, if elected, and the ability of anybody to do it, by making mandates themselves seem so utterly terrible that they should be rejected outright.