Dems Worrying Liberals With Talk of Entitlement Reform

And, we come full circle with the president's hand-picked deficit guy speaking some truth to the nation's governors:

[Erskine] Bowles said that unlike the current economic crisis, which was largely unforeseen before it hit in fall 2008, the coming fiscal calamity is staring the country in the face. "This one is as clear as a bell," he said. "This debt is like a cancer."...

"We can't grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can't tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

Could there actually be a chance for Washington to rise above the old political bickering and reach across the aisle to come to solutions? Might they be able to discard the notions of red-state ideas and blue-state ideas, and simply embrace solutions that work, in their quest to make the touch choices? Improbably, Obama's unifiying rhetoric and bipartisan vision can now be applied more accurately to the formerly toxic idea of Social Security reform than it can to his own agenda. Hopenchange.