Out of Iowa comes two great pieces of news for those of us who want the Democratic presidential candidates to get serious on healthcare: a new series of television ads is launching today by a group of activist nurses and doctors, and labor is endorsing guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model.

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.

We talk a lot here about electability - both the myth and the reality. It seems like the best way to discuss electability is to go through the swing states, one by one, and see who could win there.

I'm going to make two big assumptions. The first is that the electoral map will be broadly similar to 2004. In other words, Giuliani isn't swinging New York, there isn't another terrorist attack, and so on. The swing states are the same. For that reason, I'm going to count any state won by both Gore and Kerry as safe. I know that they aren't - especially Minnesota and Wisconsin - but if we can't deliver those seats to any of the three major candidates, we've got bigger problems. In any case, that's 248 electoral votes.

The second assumption is that the candidates run a good enough campaign along their current lines. I'd consider Kerry's campaign to have been well run - could've been better, but he did decently against an incumbent president during a war - so this isn't a particularly high bar. I'm just not going to factor in likelihood to make a big gaffe or to hire fools. Hillary will run a DLC/motherhood campaign, Edwards a populist campaign and Obama will be hopeful platitudes masking progessivism.

Do you like the accountability theme?  Tying government problems back to Bush and the Republicans?  Nobody, my friends, does it any better than Seldon Spencer of Iowa in his stump speech at the Iowa state fair.  Spencer asks amiably but bluntly, "I see the chaos in Iraq and the incompetence in Katrina and I ask who is holding George Bush and Tom Latham responsible?  The answer is nobody.  That's why I'm running."

The audio is available on the Des Moines Register website (choose news, then politics, and look at the right hand side of the page).  Spencer, a neurologist, is an absolutely gifted stump speaker.  He keeps it simple and folksy and got actual and real applause for his speech and his answers to questions (some of which were from stupid wingnuts).  He is SO much better than wingnut vet congressman Jim Nussle (who stumbles in his speech and just keeps mentioning Iowa, Iowa values and such incoherently and without reason).  he's also a lot better than Leonard Boswell.

Among his nifty answers to questions, on one about abortion and parent notification.  "I can't see putting control in the hands of a father who may have caused the problem through incest."  He added, "The problem is teen pregnancy.  We're 82nd in the world, just ahead of Burundi."  On energy, "Tom Latham has voted against mileage standards and for giving $33 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal, and nuclear energies.  We need to be sending that money back to the midwest and not to the Mideast."  He compares stem cell donors to organ donors, "If people choose to donate their embryos to save lives, that's their choice just like people choosing to donate dad's kidney."  If there is any justice, Dr. Seldon Spencer will oust nasty, short-sighted Tom Latham from Congress.