"The other piece of this that I think we should just talk about quickly is the media. So how do people learn about the bill? How do they decide if it smells? We report on it for them. I work at a newspaper and a magazine, and what we do is we report on the bit that changes every day. So part of that is process.
"But part of that, the pieces that remain in play are on the margins of the bill and are particularly the unpopular pieces. Abortion gets settled at the end. Public option, which was very controversial, gets settled at the end. The excise tax gets settled at the end.
"So while at the beginning you settle the popular parts of the bill and then you don't really mention them again that often, and then we spend an enormous amount of time talking about the Nebraska deal or the excise tax or the public option or other portions of it that are exciting and changing and are moving because Congressmen aren't politically comfortable with them.
"So one thing that you have is a focus on the parts of the bill that are hard to sell because the parts that are easy to sell got settled and we stopped talk about it."
-- Ezra Klein, 2010-03-17, on the PBS television program Charlie Rose (talking about the health care reform bill passed since then, but I'm sure we'll see this phenomenon again with some future legislation that drags out in Congress)
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