FEDERAL INSIGHT By Andy Fishburn Fighting for Air Y life is supported by relatively slow combustion that involves oxygen. Policy activity in Washington is very similar to biol-ogy and chemistry in that all of the component elements need to be in place for action to occur. An apt analogy is that attention is the equivalent of oxygen for policy formulation: If no one is paying suffi cient attention to a matter, it will not get done, regardless of how important it is. It is interesting to note that fl uorine is a very effi cient oxidizer and it causes things to burst into fl ame in its presence. Th ink of the government shutdown as the equivalent of combustion in the presence of fl uorine. change a lot between now and the Iowa caucuses early next year. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton takes almost as much oxygen out of the Washington atmosphere as all of the Republicans combined. She even dominates a lot of the news cov-erage of the race for the Republican nomination, with many stories focusing on the “who can beat Hillary factor.” So those of us who work inside the Beltway are left fi ghting for air when we’re trying to bring attention to our policy issues. Why is this? One plausible theory is that the media has gotten tired of covering a lame-duck president and a Congress that does nothing but the bare minimum. Another is that media organizations have gotten so lean that they simply can’t cover everything, so they cover the biggest thing only. Com-pounding these factors is the fact that more than $2 billion will be spent by the two parties’ respective candidates this election. It takes a long time to raise that amount of money, and you need to announce very early in the process in order to do so. Th is fundamentally leads to a two-year presidential elec-tion process rather than a process that used to take less than one year. Once the presidential election process starts, the media fl ock to it because, frankly, for most people, it’s more exciting than the legislative minutiae regarding Medicare reimbursement rates. Regardless of the reasons, the presi-dential election is in full swing and has taken all of the attention away from other very important issues. Without attention on these issues, expect very little to get done until 2017. Th e sys-tem simply doesn’t have the oxygen to complete the reaction, but watch out for fl uorine. ■ For more information, please contact Andy Fishburn , ELFA Vice President of Federal Government Relations, at afi shburn@ elfaonline.org. OU LEARN IN HIGH SCHOOL CHEMISTRY CL ASS that combustion requires an oxidizer, and you learn in biology that most Th ere’s a lot of important work to be done in Washington. Th e highway trust fund is rapidly getting depleted; the tax code is still broken with a multitude of business tax provisions expired; the debt ceiling is set to be breached later this year; and govern-ment funding is expiring at the end of September. Despite all of these impor-tant problems that need big solutions, it seems like the only thing that is get-ting enough attention to get done, in any serious long-term way, is a fi x to a long-standing problem with the Medi-care reimbursement rate. 2016 Presidential Elections Today all of the oxygen in Washing-ton is starting to get soaked up by the 2016 presidential elections. Th e Friday before Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, fully two-thirds to three-quarters of the media coverage by both Politico and National Journal was devoted to one aspect of the presidential campaign or another. On the Republican side, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio were early out of the gate with their announce-ments. As of April, Jeb Bush had all but announced that he is also running. All told, there are almost two dozen other Republicans that get mentioned in some form or another as possible presidential contenders (meaning that they are in the contest, not necessarily actually competitive). Th e narratives for coverage of the Republican nomi-nation contest are currently being dominated by the clashes between the Tea Party and the so-called Republi-can establishment, but expect this to 36 MAY/JUNE 2015 EQUIPMENT LEASING & FINANCE MAGAZINE The presidential election is in full swing and has taken all of the attention away from other very important issues. Th e other major storyline on Clinton’s candidacy is that she needs to avoid treating the Democratic nomination process as a coronation. Th is is likely to be the narrative right up until, well, the coronation. Today, no Democrat can legitimately compete against her, and the only person who can cause her not to win the Democratic nomination is Clinton herself. Th ere are factors today, such as the Benghazi tragedy, that could aff ect how independent voters view her in November, but right or wrong, these matters don’t move the needle with Democratic primary voters. SHUTTERSTOCK