Poor Diagnosis, Bad Prescription
Gloria Borger explains how arrogance and naivete doomed Clinton's helath care plan
Among all the thousands of meetings on health care reform, one Sunday night session in June still creeps into conversations. Hillary Rodham Clinton gathered about 15 people--key staff, cabinet members and the president himself--to discuss tactics in dealing with Congress. At one point Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen quietly dropped a grenade: "You may want to think about if you get something less than universal coverage." Finally, someone had said it loud enough to spark a much-needed discussion. But Bill Clinton cut it short: "I don't think I can come off universal. I'm accused of wavering. We have to stick to it, we have to be strong on this." Mrs. Clinton agreed and suggested he deliver the message during an appearance on the "Today" show. He did.
Some participants walked out thinking the reform effort was dead. It was, says one, "deflating. It was the most important meeting we had on health care, and health care was over, then and there." If Clinton was unwilling to bend, nothing would happen. But the president, in his usual way, also left his aides confused: He refused to promise a veto. "We're leaving the public with the impression that we're hard on this, yet there is something ticking away inside him that's not there," thought one attendee. "Maybe he is beginning to lose control of himself."
Too big. The charitable view is that Clinton could not decide how hard to press for universal coverage because he had no good choices. He had been handed a plan that many now concede was too complex and required too much government. Maybe he could never have controlled a Congress with its own ideas and parochial political considerations, driven by demon special interests. And maybe some Republicans would never have supported any bill with Clinton's name on it.
But the death of Clinton's health care reform plan is a defeat of much broader proportions. It is a sad lesson about a White House that had a grand vision but produced a plan with a narrow constituency. It is both a strategic failure to understand what the public wanted and a tactical failure to understand what Congress could do or how to get it done. And when the plan started sinking from its own audacity and complexity, its authors had little help in keeping it afloat.
Inside the White House, health reform became the victim of an unhealthy combination of arrogance and naivete. When advisers--such as then counselor David Gergen and then budget chief Leon Panetta--raised doubts, the reply was that the White House intended to be bold. Launching health care reform was to be the political equivalent of sending the first shuttle into space. Instead, the plan sits like an abandoned car, the air seeping out of its tires.
The day Hillary Clinton was named to lead the crusade, Dan Rostenkowski, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, gave her some advice. "Listen to everybody," he said. "The people that are your most visible adversaries in the beginning are the people you will be negotiating with in the end. Don't make enemies." Looking at Ira Magaziner, the Clintons' health guru, he added, "Get people around you that have a little dirt under their fingernails."
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