Let's Be Liberal Ree-formers

I watched Oh Brother, Where art thou? again the other night, and the message that came through this time from the Coen brothers’ serious bit of silliness is that what we need is a "ree-form candidate". Heck, we all need to be ree-form candidates, or at least ree-form advocates.

I sometimes want to join the call for a new form of liberalism. But for me, it isn't so much a new form as a new focus. I want to start filling the glass again by talking about what we need to do as well as what we need to stop.

Jobs, healthcare, deficits all call for planning, organization and action. There's got to be a better way, so let's define ours, talk about it and start pushing it.

E.J. Dionne lays out some good-to-big ideas for where to start in the Washington Post (registration required) today.

The challenge, he argues, is to indemnify those who may find themselves on the losing end of the transaction. This points to a number of big policy ideas: wage insurance, to ease the transition from one job to another; broader earned-income tax credits, to push up the wages of the lower paid; pension portability and incentives to help lower- and middle-income Americans put away money. Above all, it means guaranteed health insurance in some form, an idea increasingly appealing to companies in a competitive world market that want to take health care costs out of the prices of their goods.

Alan Stewart Carl at The Yellow Line even provides us with some encouragement from the center with today's Can Democrats Find a New Form of Liberalism?

So I'm ready. Lead on. Someone. Please.