A DISPATCH FROM AYN RAND BIZARRO WORLD

The New York Sun editorizes today about Hillary Clinton's campaign:

Mrs. Clinton claims she learned from her mistakes the last time around on health care reform, but it's hard to see how demonizing drug companies and health insurers during the campaign would set her up for a successful overhaul of the health-care system on her second try. Americans anxious about the economy want a president who will help our corporations prosper, not one who will depict vast risk-taking, innovative, and dynamic sectors of American business as public enemies.

Oh, right -- that's what Americans are really thinking as they talk about health care: Please don't do anything mean and nasty to those risk-taking, innovative, and dynamic drug and insurance companies! I beg you -- anything but that! I'd much rather die of a treatable illness!

Sure, Americans do often forget the differences between themselves and the rich, especially when fed a steady diet of misleading propaganda (see: "death tax"), and, yes, you can scare Americans with the phrase "socialized medicine," but during the first Clinton term, Big Medicine knew that it had to create a sense that the real victims of Hillarycare would be ordinary folks. Hillarycare failed not because Americans loved the drug and insurance companies, but because America thought Harry and Louise were going to have to get their cancer treated by jackbooted bureaucratic Stalinists.

This follows a gloss on Clinton's New Hampshire victory speech:

She said she would deliver on the promise that "the government will be of the people, by the people and for the people, not just the privileged few."

It was an echo of Vice President Gore's Robert Shrum-influenced disaster of a 2000 Democratic convention speech in Los Angeles, in which the Democratic Party's candidate for president vowed to take on, "Big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs," and said the president "is charged with the responsibility of fighting for all the people, not just the people of one state or one district, not just the wealthy or the powerful, all the people; especially those who need a voice, those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up, so they are never left behind."

Gore's "disaster of a 2000 Democratic convention speech"? You mean, the one that helped give him an eight-point convention bounce? Which was followed by a solid popular-vote win?

Oh, sorry -- there I go forgetting my GOP/Randian dogma and reverting to facts.