“Well, what would you suggest?” Clinton asked. Packwood told him he had several options. He could allow the House and Senate to pass a modest bill and sign it, despite his threat to veto any bill that fell short of universal coverage. But if he did, Packwood warned, “you’ll have all types of ads run against you, with you waving the veto pen.” On the other hand, if he did veto a modest bill, “you’ll be vetoing something that a lot of Americans want.” “Well, what would you suggest I do?” Clinton asked. “The best thing would be to let it die in Congress and then blame it on the Republicans,” Packwood said. But the Republicans, Packwood reminded the president, would throw the blame right back on the White House.
Not exactly an enticing menu of options. But Packwood had fairly summarized the president’s dilemma. After weeks of de-nial, Clinton and his advisers last week finally had to face reality: radical health reform is out of the question. There will be no massive government program to guarantee health coverage to every American. The grand plan the president unveiled last September was killed, slowly but surely, by fierce lobbying from interest groups, partisan bickering and the Clintons’ own blunders. Last week Congress gave up trying to produce its own version of univer-sal health care and went off on vacation. To a man who had staked his presidency on the most ambitious social agenda since Lyndon B. Johnson, it should have been a devastating blow.
Somehow it wasn’t. Clinton looked almost jolly as he headed off to Martha’s Vineyard for a vacation of his own last week. His aides sounded upbeat, if not entirely convincing. Health care wasn’t really dead, they said. After a two-week cooling-off period, Congress could come back and pass a bill that, while less dramatic than Clinton’s original plan, would still represent real reform. If the bill looked too weak, then Clinton could always pull the plug and campaign in 1996 against those obstructionist Republicans and greedy lobbyists. Buoyed by the passage of his long-delayed $30 billion crime bill, Clinton told his aides he felt optimistic about health reform.
The strain did show a little during one nerve-racking day last week, as the president juggled crime, health care and the mounting Cuban-refugee crisis. Giving the slip even to Secret Service agents, he disappeared from the Oval Office. Senior adviser Mack McLarty found him practicing his golf stroke on the South Lawn putting green. Yet there was none of the brooding quality about him that has marked other presidents under stress. Like Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, Clinton has taken to giv-ing off-the-record briefings to Washington reporters, a slightly bizarre practice for a chief executive (Time magazine files used to refer, without irony, to LBJ as “Highest Source in Land”). But the reporters who sat down with Clinton found him genial and open, eager to make peace with – even seek advice from – his various tormentors.
As Clinton jogs on the beach in Massachusetts, he will ponder a choice that has enormous consequences for the country and his political fortunes. The decision boils down to idealism versus pragmatism. There are strong arguments, both political and substantive, for and against two courses of action:
For months, the true believers in the White House have argued that if Clinton can’t have everything, he should take nothing. Better to go to the voters saying that he tried to radically reform health care than to accept some measly half-a-loaf that could make the system worse. The leading purist was the First Lady. As late as last week she was arguing that Clinton should keep fighting for universal coverage. He would be showing that he could stand on principle against the special interests, that he was the true friend of the middle class. He could blame Congress for fumbling away the opportunity for real reform.
The problem with this strategy, of course, is that the Democrats control Congress, so Clinton would be running against his own party. And if Clinton could get a bill that would improve the health-care mess, even if the reforms were modest, how could he justify vetoing it? Clinton is known as a compromiser who basically wants to please. If he were to suddenly stand on principle in this case, pundits and Republicans alike would blame Hillary Clinton for manipulating her husband into a liberal corner at a time when most Democrats are trying to run to the center.
Most Clinton aides seem to favor taking whatever they can get and declaring victory. By the end of the week, even the “fight-fight-fight” crowd, as one aide dubbed it, was willing to give Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell a chance to produce an acceptable compromise. The First Lady herself may come around. A confidante insists she is “a pragmatic politician. She would never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Clinton could rightfully claim that he started the health-care debate, that without his goading, Congress would have done nothing. The array of obstacles, from the doctors to the insurance companies to the small-business lobby, was truly formidable. It took an all-out assault to bend them even a little. All major reforms begin with small steps. This was true of social security, which began with only limited coverage, and civil rights, which were protected only gradually.
It is significant that many key liberals in Congress, including Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, a leading spokesman for sweeping reform, embraced the idea of incrementalism last week. In a “Midnight Memorandum” given to his colleagues on Thursday, Sen. Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania recalled how, as a civil-rights lawyer, he had to decide whether to accept a civil-rights reform in 1957 that fell far short of the movement’s goal. Most of his allies opposed the bill as too puny. “From his perch as Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson argued that if we got that first bill through, there would be pressure and expectation on every Congress thereafter to take further steps until the goals were reached,” Wofford wrote. That bill, he said, did pave the way for the comprehensive civil-rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.
There is the risk that if Clinton ignores his own veto threat he will be mocked as an unprincipled chameleon the way George Bush was when he broke his no-new-taxes pledge. The comic strip “Doonesbury” has recently begun portraying Clinton as an anthropomorphized waffle, a man without any real beliefs or spine. Repudiating the most dramatic promise of his presidency wouldn’t help with that image. Clinton aides are cognizant of the read-my-lips problem. But, spinmeisters that they are, they seem oddly confident that they can figure out a way to minimize the damage. “We’re not going to be absurdly bound by” the veto threat, says one senior official. Clinton’s broken promise will be harder to mock than Bush’s. Bush’s resulted in higher taxes; Clinton’s would bring modest health-care reform.
Actually, the modest reforms contemplated by the White House and congressional leaders aren’t really that modest. In the drive to persuade Americans that radical reform is necessary, Clinton managed to convince the public and press that anything short of universal coverage is piffle. That was never true. The reforms suggested by the moderates would create standardized benefit packages for all Americans to help make consumer shopping simpler. They would make it easier for employees to carry insurance from one job to another. They would establish massive cooperatives so small businesses could band together and increase their buying clout. Two years ago, these changes would have been considered revolutionary.
The problem is, Bill Clinton may have waited too long to switch to the Lyn-don Johnson mode. Now that he appears willing to make a deal, there simply may not be enough time. Even a compromise bill would entail major changes in health care, so there will be swarms of lobbyists ready to kill it. The struggle over the crime bill shows how difficult it is to get anything through Congress. And if Clinton pushes to get a bill – any bill – but fails, he will end up seeming neither pragmatic nor principled.
Before this Congress finishes its work next year, you will pass, and I will sign, legislation to guarantee [health] security to every citizen of this country.
Sept. 22, 1993
Jan. 29, 1994
July 29, 1994
Aug. 26, 1994
