PA High in Health Insurance Premiums

After talking with business owners from around the country at a recent event, I realized businesses inPA are getting a raw deal. Indeed, we're paying significantly more than average for health insurance, which makes our businesses less competitive.

Tom Knox is running for Governor of PA, and I'm very interested in this race and the candidates so I was perusing his site today and came across this article penned by Knox himself, a former owner of an insurance company (among other things; he made apparently made a lot of money on those high-interest pay-day loans, which are targetted at the working poor and cut into their earnings significantly. Not what I'd call a socially just business, but that's for another day).

Knox asserts rightly that PA businesses pay higher than other states. But he makes the argument that competition will right the ship. In no state does competition achieve the goals of

1. covering everyone with comprehensive healthcare regardless of employment
2. eliminating the high cost of defensive medicine
3. dramatically reduce costs for businesses, municipalities, nonprofits, and schools
4. attracting new businesses.

If Knox's article indicates his approach to the health and well being of the people and businesses of PA, then I'm still looking for the right candidate for Governor. Next?

Thanksgiving Prep

For the past eight years I've pretty much worked through Thanksgiving day, trying to build the business in some irrational way over yet another holiday. I'm a workaholic, which isn't good for me or the work.

This year is different for reasons I'll get into in a later post.

Last year I was turkey guy, and with substantial guidance from my wife in the kitchen and mom on the phone, turned out what I think was the perfect turkey. My pumpkin pies didn't quite make it beyond the classification of pumpkin tart, and I was the only one to try them. They were mad to mediocre, depending on the angle of the slice(yeah, that bad).

This year I'm the ice cream guy and grilled turkey guy. We bought an ice cream maker for a buck at a neighbor's yard sale last summer. Today will be the first attempt at ice cream, but we used to make it growing up and I have a decent idea of the nuances. The one improvement is the maker has an electric motor.

The grilled turkey is more of a risk--I've never done that, and the recipes call for 3 to 4 hours on the grill. It's pretty cold today (must be well under 30). Grilling turkey just sounds dicey. There's an episode on the West Wing where Bartlett says something like "there should be an 800 number anyone could call with questions on making a turkey" and his aide says "there is--it's the Butterball Turkey Hotline" (I'm significantly in the weeds with these quotes, mind you).

I'd better get to it--dinner's in less than 4 hours. What could possibly go wrong...

But first--thank you to all of my friends, family, and colleagues. You have all been so supportive and generous with your time and ears over the years (which rhymes so well I'm almost in tears), and I deeply appreciate some of you. Ok, all of you. :)

Now let's go make another mess this Thanksgiving Day.

I have a post on the way...

I'm going to think long and hard about posting about the CircleDog effort. We're making some changes, which is the understatement of my year. But I'm going to think about it for a few days. Until then, have a great holiday.

Healthcare: A Moral & Business Failure with a Pragmatic Solution

While we've focused on jobs, the stock market, and the economy, we forget other issues. When the flood waters breach the levee it's not time to talk about how lousy some of our schools are, the cycle of poverty, or the rights of women in Saudi Arabia.

Those are all important issues, but please pass the sandbags and we'll talk about it when things dry out. 94.5% of those wanting to work are, in fact, and while it will likely get worse, employment will not likely drop below 90%, especially with Obama's emergency response to the economic debacle.

But the next part of the economic crisis is also the great moral failure of our generation: healthcare. Most of us know by now that 50 million people are uninsured. Another 80 million or so are under-insured--not covered for either major medical (leading to bankruptcies) or primary care (leading to major medical issues)--and thus at risk. The risk, though, does not stop with them, it extends to the entire community. In Pennsylvania alone, about 4 million people are under-insured or uninsured.

So that's what we know. What we don't know about our inadequate, costly, employer-based system of healthcare is how much the Wall Street meltdown will drive up premiums to business this coming year, and what employers will do to handle it.

Our rates increased by more than 25% this past year, and have doubled over the past 4 years. In May, when we renewed our contract, the Dow was at 14,000. This week it hit 7500. Historically, premiums rise moderately when the markets go up, and rise dramatically when the markets fall. This is partly because insurance companies invest our premiums on the market, and when thy lose money they make it up on the backs of businesses.

Our options are limited with a dramatic increase. If rates do go up like they did last year, that's about a $40,000/year increase. That's a job. That's important marketing investment. Or that's profit we can use to reinvest and grow.

So we can do one of the following:

• cut benefits, exposing our employees to the risk inherent in being human in modern America
• cut an employee, reducing our capacity and effectiveness
• cut profitability, reducing the value of the company.

So far, we've chosen the last one. But we're an exceptional company; healthcare is one of the things we have embraced as part of our "dialtone" of company principles. (This is not to say we are perfect; we certainly make mistakes but we're a solid company with good people and a growing business).

This year, though, the increase will be huge, and the majority of employers will either reduce costs through employee layoffs or reduced benefits. With 7 million small businesses, that might be 3.5 million jobs. Maybe it's less; maybe half will choose the other option of reducing coverage, and we lose 1.7 million jobs. Either way, the increase will hurt those people directly, hurt savings, hurt new investment, reduce tax revenue at local, state, and federal levels, increase bankruptcies and foreclosures, and reduce the capacity of business to compete. So that's bad.

This is the problem with employer-based healthcare. Those losing their jobs now will have no healthcare unless they pay for COBRA (basically an expensive way of staying covered, usually costing over $12,000 a year), which given their new income level of $0 will be pretty tough. But most of those laid off will not qualify for publicly subsidized healthcare. So they are at risk. Which threatens the stability of the healthcare system itself.

I have not seen an employer-based healthcare system that achieves the following:

• covers all Americans with comprehensive healthcare (everything's covered)
• reduces the complexity and cost of the healthcare payment system
• reduces or guarantees cost levels to business
• reduces costs to individuals
• covers all regardless of employment
• eliminates costly defensive medicine (i.e., when docs over-test, over-prescribe, etc to CYA).
• eliminates the cost of healthcare administration
• enforces quality of care standards.

So this market-based system we've tried for decades has failed miserably. Obama's proposal is better, but it doesn't meet the requirements above. But many countries--87, I believe--have systems that do meet the above requirements. None of them have employer-based systems.

We can do a lot better than this. We get so hung up on politics, fear of systemic changes, and arguments about market-based solutions. Well I'm a capitalist, and the health insurance system is a drag on capitalism, friction in the economy, and, if care is the goal of the healthcare system, it's a market failure and bad for business.

We've allowed ourselves to get suckered into accepting the pain, suffering, death, and wasted dollars as the norm. That any of us is left without the basic human need of healthcare is our time's moral failure. I'm hoping we can get past the clutter of market mythology and add healthcare to the "dialtone" of our country. We can start in this state with the Family and Business Healthcare Security Act --House Bill 1660.

Deflation

The blackest of all Black Friday's? Here's a peak at some radically awesome geek price drops at major retailers. http://www.blackfriday.info/news/

The goal? Get people into the stores, sell them what they didn't come for, make margin on the cables and accessories. Classic, just much more aggressive.

Deflation is in the station.

Brilliant post on Economic Predictions from Last Year

A Finance Guy http://afinanceguy.com/ shows a terrific series of Peter Schiff absolutely calling the bursting of the bubble, arguing with pundits saying it will never happen. We called it here too...

The Flight to Value & The Long View

I was surprised a bit this week in a call about what seemed like an attempt at an apples to apples comparison between our product and retail distribution and a new drink that might be released through the Whole Foods chain. So as usual I thought about it and did some more research. Here's a brief conclusion.

First, Whole Foods is perceived as a premium chain. Whether or not the perception is accurate isn't the point; in slower times, there is a flight to value. At the same time that Nieman Marcus dropped 28% and Whole Foods is down 3 quarters in a row, WalMart is up.

I could conclude that clothing and food stores will be hit hard and general department stores will thrive, but I'd imagine that we'll find well-run grocery chains that adjust and do well and general department stores that suffer. A flight to value is for everyone, but regardless we're a value offering.

I'm not surprised that GM isn't doing well. GM has been very slow to adjust its lineup, and SUV sales are, of course, declining. Yet the Prius is selling well, and supplies of used Prii are such that the resale value is significantly higher than the average car. And GM had been giving 0% interest loans, plus discounting, plus cashback. It wasn't sustainable.

People initially respond to crises with fear, and they take protective measures until they see a change. When the dust settles, they change their behavior for self-protection to self-advancement. The products that do well during tougher times tend to be ones that 1) help people save money and 2) ones that help them make money: aspirational products. If you have a product that does both, then you're in great shape. If you're selling SUVs or premium bottled drinks through higher-end grocery chains, you're not going to thrive.

For CircleDog, we have the convergence of a number of things in our favor. Listed:

• Boomers retiring.
• Boomer retirement income cut by 20% to 40%, depending on the mix of investments
• Boomers needing to generate income will create new businesses and will need affordable software easy to use and understand.
• Small business revenue contracting. They need to expand sales and marketing activities, even while contracting.
• Small businesses stopping purchases of higher-priced software, but still have need
• Layoffs. When times get tough, the tough get going. A large number of the unemployed will turn to creating new business. We'll be there with tips and the software to help them
• We'll test a subscription payment plan to make it easier for them as well.
• Unsaturated market. The hole between Outlook and Salesforce.com is significant. This is the original premise of the effort, and it is still valid.

Finally, startups are about the long view. If we are investing to see how things work out in January or March, we're likely to be disappointed--it just takes longer than 6 months to build value and revenue. Startups are about the discovery process, and this is no different. In our case, we have proven software, a substantial hole in the marketplace, unique differentiation, and a weakening economy creating turmoil that expensive software plays cannot take advantage of.

We'll know within 12 to 18 months whether this is the next great software company or one that just makes it. Either way, the economy is something we can leverage that not many companies can.

People are coming out of their foxholes and the dust is settling. Sure, things will get worse--I think much worse. But people need and want affordable tools that will get them through this rough stretch. We're selling to a group of people that are determined to get their retirement back, to survive after layoffs, to grow and thrive despite the macro rumblings. It will be much tougher for a mature company selling premium products.

For us, we have the early indications of a willingness to spend on products that will increase revenue and save money. That's the basis I'm operating on, and I'm excited by the opportunity. We're starting our direct sales efforts, signing up a ton of partners, releasing compelling software, launching the channel partner program to the IT services industry next week, digging in, digging deep. I'm betting on CircleDog.

Weekends

The concept of the weekend has eluded me recently. I've been rolling up my sleeves for the business every weekend since mid September, trying to build revenue, develop marketing, cover 4 jobs or so.

It's likely short-sighted; I get so close to the work that I don't always see that I need to step back and hire the right person. Well, that's not accurate. I know that, I'm just ignoring it because I'm uncertain about our revenue in the current economy.

But my gut is that in recessionary times there's a flight to value. That's why Nieman Marcus dove last month and WalMart was profitable. And we're a value product company--CircleDog (customer management) and GiftWorks (fundraising management).

We're seeing an uptick in sales to realtors, even though me don't have MLS connections. Turns out they don't need MLS integration, they need what we have: simple contact management with scheduling and decent mail merge.

I find it amazing that in 2008 there's still a gaping whole in the contact management software category, and that mail merge isn't just seamless and simple like it is with CircleDog. Well, we're paying attention. And within 6 months--we hope--we'll be in every relevant store in the country.

And if I can do the right overtime work and hire the right people for the right jobs at the right time, we'll be not just a survivor, we'll be the next great American software company. At 5:45 pm on a Friday before another working weekend, that sounds a bit ridiculous. But that's what I'm working toward.

Rant on the Current Venture Capital - Startup

(from a comment I posted over on avc, edited here for a family audience)

What I find distasteful about some of the conventional wisdom and VC behavior is that VCs are taking the fears and losses of their LPs and foisting them on startups (across the board). They've made representations to their startups, both written and in word, and they have contracts and covenants with their LPs.

Instead of honoring their representations and covenants across the board--enforcing the contracts and covenants--they instead transfer the fears and losses over to founders, with cramdowns reflecting--wait for it--today's exit potential instead of future exit potential and performance, which is what they are purportedly investing in. It's wrong on so many levels.

My message to startups: screw it--build your own economy. Make your own breaks.

The VC industry appears to be showing that it is not (this is not universal, of course, and no, Fred, I'm not including you here) a trustworthy partner, and that's a shame. Venture has always valued capital over people, and proves it in the current environment. Yet it's the founders and their teams that create the value, not the capital.

So get off the VC crack. Stop wasting time presenting and start building your businesses. Really--the amount of useless time spent pitching to VCs or assuaging current ones or negotiating what flavor of ridiculous, opportunistic, land-grabbing cramdown is better spent doing what you can to live up to your own convenants--with employees and customers. If you need to cut, sure, cut. But you owe it to the people you've asked to take risks with you to give them the chance to make it work (unless of course there's no chance in hell).

BTW--none of this is directed at any VC, certainly not mine (they have their own set of issues and they are good people). But I will say this: I'll torch before I'll take a cramdown. We've said **** it--we're going to make our own breaks. And that might be the best thing all around. No new ideas, no new employees, no new marketing, just roll up the sleeves, and dig in. The true entrepeneurs will make it happen through sheer grit. Dig * * in.

The Good Life...(a video from a friend)

From a friend from SVN...

Circuit City Files for Bankruptcy

This is a reorganization, not a shutdown, but I'm among probably a long list of people to predict this failure. I've been a customer of Circuit City--reluctantly. I'm sorry some people will lose jobs. I'm sorry our software won't be on their shelves.

But Circuit City could do much to improve the customer experience. (Same with us at CircleDog--we're working on it). Our local store doesn't appear clean or well-organized. The staff is frequently inattentive if even available. The knowledge of the staff is lacking, and the attitudes aren't very helpful, and in some cases, are biased.

Some of their practices should change, as well. For instance, they charge $40 to remove crapware from your new PC. All they do is run a little program that uninstalls the crap, then put a sticker on the box indicating that it's firedog-prepped and ready to go.

Instead they should develop my loyalty by giving me a clean machine if I want it, no extra charge. If I like how they handle the sale, and am pleased with the level of service I get, and love the new clean machine, I just might use them for service.

Or not. Because I'm not sure I'd go back after trying to check out. The checkout lines are usually very long and take a long time to get through. Instead, they should equip their floor staff with handheld checkout machines, like the Apple store does.

Circuit City will not likely survive. It's just not a great experience, and anyone can do cheap (it's not the cheapest, btw). With consumer spending dropping like my brick 3-pointer attempts, I still don't see them surviving past January plus whatever time the courts give them--that's if the courts give them time. They better hope the judge has never been to one of their stores.

Summary of the last post (The Coming Healthcare Finance Crisis)

(I just summarized the last post for a friend, might be useful)

Businesses will experience possibly 50% to 100% increases in health insurance rates over the next 6 to 18 months, depending on their contracts and location.

Businesses with health insurance currently pay between 14% and 40% more than payroll for health insurance, depending on income per employee and location.

Their options with a 25% increase in rates:

• Cut employees. 1 employee per company means about 7 million new unemployed, taking the US unemployment rate to 10.7%. If the average pay is $40,000, you have 10 employees, and current healthcare costs are 25% of payroll, and rates increase 25% because of insruance company investment losses, you just loss $25,000, which has to come from somewhere
• Pay the huge increases, reducing profitability (profit would have to be significant to absorb this kind of increase), unless you...
• Increase prices, which is difficult in a recession, but if possible it's inflationary
• Reduce benefits, exposing employees to greater risk and cost, further taking disposable income out of the consumer-driven economy and putting employes at great risk of personal financial ruin
• Shut down.

Here's why:

• Markets are down 40% since May.
• Health insurance companies pool premiums and invest a significant portion across a diverse number of investment vehicles
• All of those investment vehicles have taken a serious hit.
• Insurance rates have historically risen dramatically when markets fall--it's and inverse relationship.
• There is nothing regulating health insurance rate increases, and I would suspect there's a bit of collusion; when we shop for rates they are typically similar each year.

The Coming Healthcare Finance Crisis

President-elect Obama, the economic news is about to get a lot worse.

Imagine for a minute that you're someone who pays bills from investment income--a day trader, a retiree living off of stock dividends and bonds, a portfolio manager. You can immediately understand that the income from those investments has taken a significant hit since May, when the Dow was over 14,000.

Now it's November, and since July--when the first popularly obvious signs of collapse emerged with the Fannie/Freddie bailout--the market has slid to the murky range between 8,000 and 9,000. It's a big drop--about 40% depending on the Dow on any given day.

As someone depending on investment, your income will likely drop about that amount, depending on the mix of stocks in your account, but the S&P and Nasdaq have dropped about the same percentage, so let's assume your choices aren't any better or worse than the indexes.

If you typically received $5,000 a month in income and wisely saved 20% of that and spent the rest, you are now losing $1,000 a month ($5k -2k=3k, with $4k in expenses).

Now, imagine you are a health insurance company. You take premiums from customers, pool them together, and pay healthcare bills submitted by healthcare providers. If you have a good healthy pool of customers, you take in more than you pay out, and you work hard to keep from paying claims and to operate efficiently to maximize your profit.

Except that simply pooling the premiums doesn't generate enough profit for your tastes, so you invest the pool into various markets to get the best return possible. Interest rates are very low, so you don't buy CDs or bonds. You invest in the best economies of the world. In fact, you diversify across world markets.

And if you're smart, you probably take a percentage and save it for a rainy day--a contingency fund, perhaps.

Then the rain comes. It's pouring.

You've invested your customers' premiums into a market that just dropped 40% in value. So now you've lost money on the markets, and despite your global diversification you've lost anyway, because it's a global crisis. That play in China that gave you a 70% boost up until January just came crashing down 50%.

Yet you budgeted on your previous gains. Ouch.

So you need money to pay the claims. Where will you get it?

Customers.

Because of the market meltdown and its effect on health insurance investments, businesses are about to experience the largest annual increase in premiums in modern history. In Pennsylvania, the increases will be even more and disproportionately pronounced for small businesses, because the PA Insurance rules allow insurance companies to treat each business as a separate risk pool, which prevents small businesses from enjoying the benefits of spreading the risk, and allows insurance companies to "laser" out poor risk profiles.

They lose money on the market, but they still have to pay claims. So they increase rates to businesses. My business, yours.

If you chart insurance rates against the performance of the stock market over the past 40 years, you'll find that rates are relatively stable during periods of growth, but grow dramatically during down cycles. And no cycle has been as down as our current one since the Great Depression.

The effect will be this: rates will go up well above average--more than 30% on average. For small companies like mine, rates will jump by over 50%. Maybe even double.

Businesses--who ration for their employees at will--will do some combination of 4 things:

• cut employees
• cut healthcare coverage
• shop longer and harder for health insurance, diluting management resources
• shut down

Our rates have more than double over the past 4 years. This is already unsustainable. This year, I have no idea what our rates will be, but before the crash they went up 29%. Highmark put a bid in 70% higher than last year. We switched.

We're a successful startup. After 6 years of invention, development, marketing, evangelizing, mistakes and triumphs, we've figured it out. We're profitable and growing in our core business, and launching a startup within the startup.

Healthcare costs cut directly into profitability and investment in growth. If PA adopts the single-payer payment system, our costs would be 50% lower, enabling us to hire 3 entry-level people, or pay dividends, or invest in marketing and growth.

Instead, that money will go to insurance companies, taken out of our pockets, or out of the pockets of our employees if we decide on their behalf that we can't afford it.

Multiply this across 7 million small businesses in the US. Cut 1 employee per company to cover the cost of the insurance increases, and our unemployment rate will jump from 6.5% to 10.7%. You think the automotive sector is in trouble now? Take 7 million more consumers out of the marketplace and see what happens. Retail? Neiman Marcus dropped 28% last month. Circuit City will be bankrupt in January. Retailers (and I know this from direct experience selling CircleDog into retail stores) aren't taking on new products because inventories are high--things just aren't moving in a lot of sectors.

Add to this more job losses, more pressure on emergency services, and more bankruptcies and foreclosures because of the healthcare financing crisis, and we're in serious danger of a depression.

"Considered a rare but extreme form of recession, a depression is characterized
by abnormal increases in unemployment, restriction of credit, shrinking output and investment, numerous bankruptcies, reduced amounts of trade and commerce, as well as highly volatile relative currency value fluctuations, mostly devaluations. Price deflation or hyperinflation are also common elements of a depression."

Now, to me it would make sense to save those 7 million jobs by eliminating the 420,000 jobs in the health insurance industry through the adoption of a national healthcare payment system, a single-payer plan. Everybody would be in the same risk pool, we'd go from the inefficiencies of 8,000 non-competing health insurance companies to a single fund, from 150 different forms to 1 form, from 12 administrators per doctor to less than 1, and from the current rates to about 40 or 50% of the current rates, and a drop in sales, marketing, and executive management costs of 100% to zero.

This isn't socialized medicine, it's an efficient, economically solid group payment plan, proven the world over. The group is 300 million citizens. Adopting it will remove significant and frankly stupid friction from the marketplace, easing the way for small businesses to focus on their core missions and less on healthcare, healthcare management, and the annual, costly burden of health insurance shopping.

Sometimes simplifying is the way to deal with complex problems. If we had 8,000 different road companies that we individually paid based on whichever deal might get us roads that take us from here to somewhere else on time more likely than the others, it would be utter chaos. The healthcare system is utter chaos.

There are times when it makes sense to come together as a nation and pool our resources for the great good: defense, the electric grid, air traffic control, regulation of markets, national highways, hurricanes, police, fire, education, and healthcare. Healthcare is the only one on that list where we don't join together for efficiency, and it is now the one that threatens all the others.

I have no stake in a single-payer system, other than this: I'm a businessman held back by the current system, who has seen what happens when poorly or partially covered people have healthcare crises, and who understands economics enough to know that GM, Ford, Chrysler, the City of Lancaster, the School District of Philadelphia, and every business, nonprofit and municipality in the United States is about to experience a jarring rise in premiums that will lead to a huge loss of jobs and create huge holes in our healthcare infrastructure.

We must act now.

Obama!

My first inclination wasn't to blog--it was to celebreate. And we did. I've felt overwhelming joy for the past two days--it's simply fantastic.

What I didn't expect was the reactions of others--the sincere, heartfelt joy of other people is inspiring to see.

And the thought crossed my mind: this single event, simply the election of Obama has and inspired and catalyzed so many people to change their own lives, to change what they do, to reach. It's not just about hope now. It's more than just optimism. It's about action that will change America and the world.

And I think it's changed me. From just being a sideline supporter/donor 4 years ago when he ran for Senate to something entirely different. I'm not sure what yet. But for now, I'm just proud to be an American.

Blogging Restart

I've been blogging since 1999. I'm on my 4th blog or so; the first I built out of Notepad, ASP and html, the rest I've made with a few clicks at Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad.

I was introduced to Typepad back in 2003 by Markos Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong. Markos and Jerome were the creators of Dean's Net Roots initiative, informed by Joe Trippi's view of a bi-directional campaign, where the campaign spoke and supporters spoke back.

Markos went on to create DailyKos.com, which is the most popular liberal blog with millions of visitors monthly, and Jerome created MyDD.com, which is not as popular but has its own value to it. They were pioneers, and I learned little from them if you judge from my own traffic.

I haven't aspired to be a well-known blogger. I'm not even sure why I do it. Maybe something I write will influence someone's thinking in a positive way. Maybe not. But I feel compelled to express thigns that come to mind that someone might find valuable.

Lately I've been blogging the negative, I feel, and I've gotten tired of that. I like to look at criticism as the optimism of dissent. Dissent does not come in a vaccum; it comes from a context of a vision for something better--at least in the dissenter's mind.

You complain about the convention center not so much because you hate convention centers, but because you feel there is a better Lancaster not well-served by such a concentration of energy, political will, and public dollars and credit.

You voice strong opposition to the bailout not because you feel banks should fail or that it's fundamentally wrong, but because it misses the point (there are better things we can do to fix the economy than provide a mere buffer for banks, for instance) and ignores the systemic problems and injustice inherent in our economic playing field.

So (after hundreds of posts) I'm going to try something new. Instead of the optimism of dissent, I'm just going to talk about the things that are already happening that reflect an optimistic vision, rather than the things that impede progress. This won't be a complete abandonment of complaints and dissent, but I'll try to stick with it.

So with that, I'm going to go enjoy a beautiful Fall's summer day.

Democracy

My father passed away 12 years ago Sunday. He would have loved this election. He would have hated the work of the Bush administration. And he would have loved how American this election cycle has been.

Barack Obama's candidacy has brought out the best in us--and the worst in some ways. On the whole, this campaign season has been a great debate of worldviews, the policies that reflect them, and what it means to be American. Sure, there have been many, many terrible things said by people I would have thought were smarter or more committed to fairness. When George Will renounces his party's behavior, you know Republicans are in serious trouble.

The past eight years of Republican rule have greatly damaged this country. They've managed to bungle the economy, invade the wrong country, lose the respect and support of the rest of the world, eviscerate the Constitution, dismantle environmental regulations that protected people, weaken regulatory bodies like the SEC, FCC, FDA, and others to make it easier for corporations to unfairly compete and avoid responsibility for their behaviors.

Turnout will be heavy today. Obama's campaign has inspired so many people who typically would have stayed on the sidelines. And people are fed up. They've had enough. So they've turned off their TVs and headed down to the local Obama campaign HQ and signed up. And walked. And talked. Knocked on doors. Called people they don't know. Made lots of friends with other people who are fed up. Worked hard to change the country.

Many of my Republican friends are campaigning for Obama. Some can't believe that anyone would vote for McCain-Palin, and were insulted by McCain's choice of her for VP.

Obama vs McCain is the difference between intelligence and not. Inspiration and not. Leadership and not. Fealty to fairness and not. We have serious problems in this country, and McCain's response was to point fingers at Obama and add the dismally caustic Palin to the ticket. We need serious leadership. I want the smartest guy in the room, not the guy who finished 5th from the bottom of his class and professes no understanding of the economy yet feels compelled to call Obama a socialist.

Obama is significantly liberal compared with moderate Republicans; accusations of Obama as liberal socialist come from the far-right, the extremists, not the intellectual right or the sensible moderates. I'm more liberal than Obama, and I'm a capitalist. A free-range, grass-fed beef-eating Democratic-libertarian liberal capitalist.

The smartest guy in the room also brings the smartest group of people to the White House since 1993. The Bush administration will be famous for its hiring of incompetents and sycophants, rather than hiring the best and the brightest. Obama's administration will be famous for bringing the smartest, most dedicated Americans to Washington, regardless of party.

And I think this new era will not be adequately defined as post-racist America. I'd rather see it defined as something more positive, without reference to the bigots that have held back this country and threatened those who bring sincere commitment to the optimistic vision of America the melting pot of opportunity.

This election is a repudiation of the hateful, negative, regressive voices of the far right. Your fifteen minutes are up. We're tired of it. And today's landslide will slam the door shut on you.

I will not miss Dick Cheney. Or McCain, or Palin, or Bush, or the blathering right-wing. I will not miss those who justify undermining the Constitution for any reason, much less the power grabs of the past 8 years.

And yes, I'm thrilled to have the first black president. I smile ear to ear thinking about it. In an age where the KKK is regaining strength, Americans are sending an African American to the Oval Office. Bigots will be bigots--we'll always have them. But you can no longer prevent the country from evolving to a more just, compassionate, optimistic place. You've stood in the way of democracy, justice, and fairness, and you've been swept aside.

And you're welcome to join in the fun and help the country get to that more perfect place, where all people are treated equally under the law, where we celebrate and promote the good in people. Where the country that has so much capacity to do good in the world finally starts to do so. We need you too.

The problems are significant. It will take between 5 to 10 years for Americans and American businesses to work through the debt. It will take several years to get out of Iraq. The 11 or 12 trillion in national debt Bush leaves us with will not go away without sacrifice. But we've got the smartest people in the country about to take on these problems, and I'm confident they'll do a great job. But they'll need help.

After seeing this amazing campaign up close (the Lancaster Obama HQ is on the first floor of my office), after seeing the hundreds of people from out of state to help spread the word, and after seeing couch potatoes become community organizers and activists all because of Obama, I'm certain we'll have the help we need. It's a happy day.