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Jennifer Rubin makes a good point about the careful balancing act being employed by Obama when talking about the recession. On the one hand, he wants to describe things as severe enough so that he can justify the rapid expansion of government, but at the same time, he wants to reassure investors, businesses, and consumers, hence the statement he made yesterday on "Meet the Press" that things are going to get worse before they get better, but the crisis we face is "nothing compared" to what FDR faced in  1933. Obama also suggested that one of the main reasons why it isn't as bad is the existence of Social Security and other government safety nets, thus creating the opening for him to argue for national health care. This will emerge as one of the primary talking points in the drive for universal health care, and the media is already starting to do its part, with stories like this one from the NY Times, titled, "When a Job Disappears, So Does Health Care." Of course, there is a pretty clear way to get around this problem -- changing the tax code so that people obtain their health care on their own rather than through their employers, allowing them to keep it when they lose their jobs or switch from one to another. But unfortunately, John McCain didn't to a very good job explaining his own health care plan during the campaign, so we're left with Obama's plan, filled with government subsidies, regulation, and a new Medicare-like program with expanded elgibility. And if Tom Daschle gets his way, perhaps a Federal Health Board that oversees it all, doing for medicine what the Federal Reserve did for banking.