A Woman in Charge (66 page)

 

W
HEN
R
EPUBLICAN
senator John Chafee and Democratic representative Jim Cooper introduced their own separate alternative proposals, the Clintons overlooked what may have been their best opportunity to compromise on a health care plan. Chafee, a liberal Republican with no animus toward the Clintons or their politics, introduced his plan with twenty Republicans already pledged to support it in the Senate. House Republicans pitched a similar bill on the same day. And when Cooper and his principal House co-sponsor, Iowa Republican Fred Grandy, came forth with their bill, they were already endorsed by forty-six other Democratic and Republican co-sponsors. Both Chafee's and Cooper's proposals would have given huge numbers of Americans adequate health care coverage for the first time—about 85 percent as many as the Hillary-Magaziner proposal—and had enough support to make passage in the House and Senate likely.

At such a pivotal juncture, Hillary could have thrown her support behind either bill. Later, Bill Clinton said perhaps he should have intervened. Hillary would eventually write that she knew the Republicans would spare no effort to defeat any bill that she favored, because if she were perceived as victorious her husband's second term would be assured.

The Republican alternative proposed by Chafee would come close to attaining the administration's primary goal of universal coverage but would not impose price controls on insurance premiums or mandate that employers buy their workers' care. Hillary had initially hoped that Chafee, whom she regarded as a real champion of health care reform, would work with her to draft a bill. But when she suggested a joint proposal months earlier, the senator had told her that Republicans were intent on creating their own alternative and that it would be better for “you to get your bill, and we will get ours. Then we will sit down.” Chafee, true to his promise to Hillary, spoke only positively about the broad outlines of her plan as it developed. “It's certainly possible that serious discussions could bring us closer to agreement on those issues that we have in common,” he told reporters. Meanwhile, the first lady continued to keep lines of communication open to Chafee and publicly complimented his health care record.

As the process dragged on, the dedicated, determined opponents of reform seized the debate with news conferences, television ads, jaded public opinion polls, and successful fund-raising appeals. They enlisted grassroots support to target key members of Congress in their home states. Lobbyists began calling Hillary “Big Sister,” and when events took a turn for the worse, “Shillary.”

The most damaging attack in the war on the Clintons' plan came from Harry and Louise, a couple invented by lobbyists and ad agencies that together represented 270 small and midsized insurance companies. The commercials, which cost $30 million to produce and air, used the Everyman characters to vocalize and provoke many Americans' fears about the Clintons' health care proposal. In one ad, the married couple sat at their kitchen table fretting over whether Hillary's health insurance would cover them as sufficiently as their present health plan. A voice-of-God announcer warned, “The Government may force us to pick from a few health plans designed by government bureaucrats.” Then Louise chimed in: “Having choices we don't like is no choice at all.” Another ad noted that there would be spending limits on policies: “The Government caps how much the country can spend on all health care and says, ‘That's it!'” Harry asks Louise, “So what if our health plan runs out of money?” Louise ponders, “There has got to be a better way.”

The White House had been offered an opportunity to stop these ads, early in the debate. The day after Bill had held up his blue card in front of the cameras, the HIAA—the Health Insurance Association of America—offered to cancel the Harry and Louise campaign if Magaziner and Hillary would reopen negotiations with the organization. They did not respond.

At the White House, polls showed the opponents' ads were killing off support for Hillary's plan. Hillary commanded the lieutenants in her war room in the Executive Office Building to work overtime to answer the attacks. The Democratic National Committee escalated its offensive with harmful, self-defeating language that tarred important segments of the insurance industry and medical community. Hillary had earlier showed some willingness to compromise with Chafee, but when push came to shove, her unwillingness to compromise further undermined any chance of implementing real reform.

By the time Hillary and Magaziner had provided the White House a formal bill to be submitted to Congress—on the last day of the 1993 session—it had grown to 1,324 pages and was so large and complex that even Hillary's closest allies on the Hill could not fathom its contents. The president's own advisers were still flummoxed about how it could be paid for.

Hillary believed the size of the bill was used against her unfairly. Other bills ran to that length, she wrote, and her bill would have replaced “thousands of pages” of regulations, which was true. But Republicans had turned an asset into a vulnerability, she acknowledged.

Once the Clintons had submitted their bill, William Kristol, a leading Republican strategist and conservative voice who had served as former Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff, sent a memo to all Republican members of the House and Senate. Compromise in any form, Kristol warned, was a mistake if Republicans were to succeed in the upcoming midterm elections. He wrote perceptively, if cynically, that the passage of health care reform “will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” Republican congressman Lamar Smith of Texas also circulated a letter to the Republican offices on the House side, laying out a strategy in which “Whitewater and health care” would be the sole themes of a week of speeches and media concentration by his GOP colleagues. Smith's letter provided several pages of suggested talking points and harsh sound bites. Shockingly, even at this late juncture, the White House had failed to set in motion even a rudimentary constituency campaign in support of health care reform.

By late spring of 1994, Bill understood that health care—and the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill—was in trouble. Stan Greenberg told him that the Democrats might have difficulty retaining the Senate. In a memo for the president and Hillary's eyes only, Greenberg wrote, “The administration, the Democrats in Congress and the party face a disaster in November unless we move urgently to change the mood of the country.” Greenberg's research with a focus group led him to conclude, “The voters believe Bill Clinton is struggling to handle the presidency and guide the country.” Their perception held that he was “over his head,” “indecisive,” “immature…. This is about being young and inexperienced, from a small, backward state, and failing to master the bad forces at work in Washington.”

 

W
HEN, AT LAST,
Hillary and her health care brain trust threw overdue resources and energy into recovering the initiative during the summer of 1994, the Whitewater effect had spread its stain. The young first lady who had come to the White House with such high expectations and, the polls had indicated, the wind at her back, was now a weight on her husband's presidency, with persistent enemies.

The decision to emulate the Freedom Rides in the American South of the 1960s with a bus caravan of Reform Riders trying to create a national movement in 1994 to pressure Congress for health care reform was well intended. But a send-off rally in Portland, Oregon, was sabotaged immediately by an angry anti-Clinton mob who blocked the way with their own dilapidated bus covered symbolically in red tape and dragged by a tow truck with a sign that read, “This Is Clinton Health Care.” A low-flying light plane pulled a banner that said, “Beware the Phony Express.” The pro–health care, cross-country bus trek had been named the “Health Security Express.”

By the time the caravan reached Seattle, the threat of violence was constant. All week, talk radio hosts, both in the Northwest and on national broadcasts, implored listeners to confront the Reform Riders, to “show Hillary” their feelings about her. This “call to arms,” as she described it, attracted menacing hordes, many of whom identified themselves as militia members, tax resisters, and anti-abortion militants. She estimated that at least half of the 4,500 people in the audience of her Seattle speech were protesters. She agreed for the first time to wear a bulletproof vest. Rarely had she felt endangered, but this was different. During her speech, the catcalls, screaming, and heckling drowned out much of her remarks. When she left the stage and got into a limousine, hundreds of protesters surrounded the car. They were rabid with hatred. Several arrests were made by the Secret Service, which impounded two guns and a knife.

Though Hillary had returned to Washington, the buses were confronted at each major stop by angry demonstrators. They shouted that Hillary and Bill intended to destroy their way of life, “ban guns, extend abortion rights, protect gays, socialize medicine.” The protests were vocal, virulent, menacing, and well organized by a previously unknown organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). Its agents were secretly working with Newt Gingrich's staff on Capitol Hill and with Republican senators and their aides, reporters later discovered. The funding for CES was provided by Richard Mellon Scaife, who was simultaneously providing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Arkansas Project.

There had been four caravan routes publicized by the Health Care Express riders. Each became “an expedition into enemy territory…with better-armed, better-prepared, better-mobilized anti-Clinton protesters at each stop along the way,” wrote David Broder and Haynes Johnson, in their study of Hillary's health care failure. The implicit threats of violence caused many stops to be canceled and the buses rerouted.

The same week, Gingrich announced that House Republicans were now united against health care reform and hoped “to use the issue as a springboard to win Republican control of the House.” He predicted the Republicans would win an additional thirty-four House seats in November, and that enough Democrats, perhaps as many as six, would switch parties to give the Republicans control of the House. His prediction, though mentioned in the
New York Times,
received little media notice.

For months, Bob Dole had been toying with trying to work out a compromise on health care. “Is it time yet for the Moynihan-Dole bill?” he asked in a note slipped to the New York senator. There had been speculation that the two senators would quietly put together a deal that would provide a more limited health reform package than Hillary's. Meanwhile, Dole was coming under pressure from his party's right, including a letter signed by Richard Viguerie (the direct-mail maven of the conservative movement), Phyllis Schlafly (of anti-abortion crusades), and L. Brent Bozell (who had campaigned against “liberal bias” in the media for decades before the term became a buzzword) cautioning that signs of “willingness to compromise on behalf of Big Government” would mean that Dole—and Gingrich, who received the same letter—would “be denied conservative grassroots support in 1996.” Dole soon said he opposed any compromise.

By the time the Health Security Express reached the White House on August 3, its six hundred exhausted Reform Riders welcomed in the Rose Garden by Hillary and Bill, health care reform was on life support. Majority Leader George Mitchell submitted a “rescue” package in the Senate and Dick Gephardt a corresponding bill in the House. Both pieces of legislation were much scaled down versions of the original Magaziner-Hillary plan, less bureaucratic and less government-driven in the extreme. Two weeks later, at a congressional Democratic leadership luncheon at which the compromise was discussed, Senators Ted Kennedy and Bob Kerrey got into a loud argument about strategy. When word of the bitterness got out, it contributed to the image of a Democratic Party splintering on the Clintons' watch.

By the time Mitchell pulled the plug on health care reform on September 26, 1994, it was an idea whose time had come and, tragically, gone.

 

W
HEN POLLSTER
Greenberg had first told Bill Clinton in the spring that Democrats might have trouble retaining the Senate, Greenberg also advised the president to attack the Republicans for obstructing health care reform, withdraw its consideration until after the 1996 election, and then, in its place, introduce a welfare reform bill. The administration at the time was already on the verge of passing a crime bill. If they could win passage of both a crime bill and welfare reform—a key enticement to independent and swing voters—they would have a strong record on which Democrats could run in the November congressional elections. Health care, meanwhile, could be postponed until after the voters had gone to the polls.

Clinton had asked Greenberg to discuss the matter with House Speaker Tom Foley. “Foley said absolutely not,” Greenberg reported. “He said the liberals would be totally opposed to welfare reform, and there was still the hope that health care could be pushed through.”

In the West Wing, by fall, the criticism of Hillary by some of the president's aides was hard to ignore. Bill seemed disconsolate. He was obviously feeling isolated and withdrawn even from some of his closest associates. He was angry, yet at times he appeared almost bereft. They had never seen him in this state before. Stephanopoulos, Myers, and a few other deputies familiar with his habits surmised that such melancholia was occasioned not only by the harsh political realities and attacks, but from isolation and tension building between him and Hillary as well.