Clinton’s Health Defeat Sways Obama’s Tactics
By JACKIE CALMES
NYT
WASHINGTON — Before Congress’s August break, the chief aides to Senate Democrats met in a nondescript Senate conference room with three former advisers to President Bill Clinton. The topic: lessons learned the last time a Democratic president tried, but failed disastrously, to overhaul the health care system.
With the aides as divided as their bosses on President Obama’s signature initiative, their typically tedious weekly session turned hotly spirited. So the Clinton White House veterans — John D. Podesta, a former senior adviser; Steve Ricchetti, a Congressional lobbyist; and Chris Jennings, a health policy aide — homed in on their ultimate lesson of the failure 15 years ago, that there is a political cost to doing nothing.
In 1994, Democrats’ dysfunction over fulfilling a new president’s campaign promise contributed to the party’s loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress. Now that memory is being revived, and it is the message the White House and Congressional leaders will press when lawmakers return this week, still divided and now spooked after the turbulent town-hall-style meetings, downbeat polls and distortions of August.
Republicans early on united behind the lesson they took from the past struggle, that they stand to gain politically in next year’s elections if Democrats do nothing. But the Democrats’ version similarly resonates with all party factions, giving Mr. Obama perhaps his best leverage to unify them to do something. In now-familiar financial parlance, this one is “too big to fail.”
(Continued here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — Before Congress’s August break, the chief aides to Senate Democrats met in a nondescript Senate conference room with three former advisers to President Bill Clinton. The topic: lessons learned the last time a Democratic president tried, but failed disastrously, to overhaul the health care system.
With the aides as divided as their bosses on President Obama’s signature initiative, their typically tedious weekly session turned hotly spirited. So the Clinton White House veterans — John D. Podesta, a former senior adviser; Steve Ricchetti, a Congressional lobbyist; and Chris Jennings, a health policy aide — homed in on their ultimate lesson of the failure 15 years ago, that there is a political cost to doing nothing.
In 1994, Democrats’ dysfunction over fulfilling a new president’s campaign promise contributed to the party’s loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress. Now that memory is being revived, and it is the message the White House and Congressional leaders will press when lawmakers return this week, still divided and now spooked after the turbulent town-hall-style meetings, downbeat polls and distortions of August.
Republicans early on united behind the lesson they took from the past struggle, that they stand to gain politically in next year’s elections if Democrats do nothing. But the Democrats’ version similarly resonates with all party factions, giving Mr. Obama perhaps his best leverage to unify them to do something. In now-familiar financial parlance, this one is “too big to fail.”
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
John Tantillo published a post on his marketing blog about how the idea of public health insurance doesn't mesh with the American brand, and is therefore bound to fail. http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/08/11/john-tantillos-brand-winner-and-loser-pg-and-the-selling-of-health-care.aspx
I absolutely disagree--but I think that his argument is interesting, and gives some insight into the views and hesitations of the plan's (plans'..) detractors. Tantillo says that Americans are open to temporary, situational government help--but not to long-term, institutionalized government help.
"Institutionalized" government aid is supported by the left and right when it comes to roads and infrastructure, by the left and the majority of the right when it comes to schools--and I think that only a very small fraction of the Republicans would advocate for eliminating (rather than reforming) Medicare and Medicaid. As one writer pointed out - "The truth hurts for some: we already have government run health care. They license doctors and accredit hospitals, approve drugs, finance research and medical education, and already insure the poor and elderly."
For me, the 'takeaway' from Tantillo's piece is that for Obama's plan to succeed, he must market the idea of public health care as an American plan--particularly as the opposition is using the term "socialized medicine"--invented by a PR firm in Truman's time (along with a quote attributed to Stalin that I think has never been corroborated...).
In this case, looking at the issue from a branding angle makes a lot of sense!
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