The Kerry/Edwards campaign released a book length outline of their plans if elected. I started skimming the section on health care, the issue that comes up most around here. The two things I’ve come away with so far is that it’s essentially their stump speech with lots more details and that the numbers they’re quoting are over many years. Of course, I’ve only read 4 pages out of 263, but I’d invite people to take a stab at sections they are interested in, reading the whole thing, and posting comments. I’m curious if it actually goes into detail.

As I was reading this, I was also thinking about whether there is some sort of secrecy motivation when releasing stuff like this. I mean, is it a bad thing (and would it even happen) if your opponent’s campaign picked up some ideas from a real outline of a plan and adopted them? Would they even do it? If campaigns did snag good ideas from each other, would that be good for the public? A proxy for actually sitting down and working out issues, maybe?