One simple question and then some reflections

In advance of President Obama's speech tonight about healthcare, I have one simple question -

If a government-run option is such a good idea for all of the rest of us, why do Obama and the Congress refuse to sign up for it themselves?

On a related note, Ponnuru discusses the Left's disregard for truth.

Glenn Reynolds links to Martin Feldstein and adds his own comments:

"The higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards." But lower living standards for you are a small price to pay in exchange for more power for the political class — whose living standards won’t be going down at all...

All of which is what the American people have instinctively figured out. Just like we have throughout history.

Camille Paglia, an Obama supporter, writes about the divide:

...Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights...

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?...I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past...

Meanwhile, all of these developments have occurred while the Republican party has been comatose on policy ideas.