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Dems, Health Care Need to Enter the iPhone Age

Lumbering dinosaur of a bill will fall flat with 21st century voters

By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:52 AM CDT

(Newser) – We live in the age of the iPhone, a world in which you can take your pick of 100,000 apps—and "Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965," writes Daniel Henninger for the Wall Street Journal. It's not what you'd hope for from our hipster-in-chief. "But the Obama health care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age."

An "iPhone for health care" allowing users to pick and choose apps would have been a much better plan, Henninger writes, and would have left room for improvements through trial and error. The GOP may not be any better, Henninger writes, but the Democrats increasingly look like the party most chained to a "pre-iPhone political model that will increasingly strike average everyday American voters as weird and alien to their world."

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pause during a news conference about the Obama administration's first 100 days on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big-box politics. - Daniel Henninger

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Dems, Health Care Need to Enter the iPhone Age