FOREGO THE PLANS, BUT KEEP THE PRINCIPLES. A lot of interesting talk about whether candidates should release detailed policy proposals today. Putting aside professional desires -- what will I wonk at if not candidate white papers? -- I come down on the side of specificity, at least on the big, controversial, politically dangerous elements. Put it this way: Every Democratic candidate elected promises to bring universal health care to the people. The party's ranks don't lack for generalities on the issue. But universal health care is a beast to get passed. Even more so if you've not built consensus for it in advance. A plan emanating out of Congress will be more, not less, vulnerable to industry evisceration, as its proponents will have less time to explain it before its detractors knock it down. In short, that's what happened with Hillarycare. Clinton, remember, did not bring out a terrifically detailed plan during the election. Instead, he convened, under Hillary's leadership, a sprawling web of advisors and experts and operatives to construct a comprehensive piece of legislation. I agree, of course, that Congress should've been more involved. But the end result was the same: Out came a bill that its proponents proved unable to positively explain before its enemies absolutely demonized it. They never had a chance. 1993 wasn't a year when Clinton could dominate the airwaves, and a health care bill, particularly one as big and comprehensive as theirs, must be repeatedly and effectively explained. They lacked the time and they lacked the visibility to do so. Now take another template: What if a candidate ran largely on health care? Or on a tax reform plan? Let's use community rating. That's a specific policy portion of any good health care plan, and it's exactly the sort of thing that draws interest group fire. So one of the fights our hypothetical nominee picks, during the election, while she has media coverage, is community rating. "Insurance companies," she says, "cannot continue punishing the sick and the unlucky." And she starts the fight. She goes to war. She picks the battlefield. And let's say she wins the election. In that case, the mandate is there. Congress can work out the details, but that's going in the bill. To some degree, the word "details" here is misleading. The important thing, which Mark actually preserves in his post, are the mechanisms, the non-negotiable elements, what I called the bottom-lines. Community rating. Purchasing alliances. Medicare enrollment. FDA reform. Things like that. They, not their specifics, are exactly what the industry will fight. And they are the fights progressives have to win. Whether you want to define the exact range of tax subsidies or the precise standards for acceptable plans is somewhat beside the point. What you must do during an election is win the argument over the principles, the outline. With that battle won, you actually can turn it over to Congress and get a decent result. Without that mandate though, without proving the waters are safe, the legislature's natural risk aversion will kick in and Senator Max Baucus will craft you a perfectly useless set of tax subsidies. So stay vague, if you must, but pick the elemental battles. Not the ones specific to your plan, but those common to any plan you will accept. There's no better time to advocate for them, after all, then during an election, when your earned media is at its peak, your paid media is maxed out, and the landscape is too crowded for special interests to drown out your voice. But if you take the easy way out and just ask for universal insurance, well, you may get something that's technically universal, but you're not going to get anything this crowd of discussants will like. Unless you convince the electorate of the need for community rating and public insurance options and guaranteed issue and all the rest, you're not going to get Congress to sacrifice industry donations for any of them. --Ezra Klein
