What Obama Did Wrong

On health-care reform, the president didn't repeat Clinton's mistakes. Obama made new ones.

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Feb 12, 2010

Many armchair analysts agree President Obama shouldn't have tackled comprehensive health-care reform in his first year, that he should have focused on the economy and creating jobs. That's easy to say now that we've seen what a hash Congress made of the reform effort. But if Obama had walked away from universal health care, it would have been seen as a colossal betrayal of the Democratic dream and the liberal lion whose endorsement helped propel him to the White House.

Obama's nomination was far from a sure thing when Sen. Ted Kennedy, with Caroline Kennedy at his side, took the stage at American University a week before Super Tuesday and endorsed Obama. It was one of those moments in politics when the ground shifted, when liberals and feminists and African-Americans—the Democratic base—got the OK from their first family of politics to back Obama, an upstart in the party, over Hillary Clinton, who had assumed this would be her base, as it had been during her husband's presidency.

As it turned out, Kennedy's endorsement wasn’t enough for Obama to carry Massachusetts, an inkling perhaps of what would follow with this year's loss of Kennedy's seat to Republican Scott Brown. Hillary's feistiness was more popular with working-class Democrats in the state than Obama's cool intellectualism. The Kennedy mystique took a minor hit, but the national momentum had shifted to Obama, generationally and culturally, and Kennedy made it happen.

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