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Speaking at a fundraiser in Denver last night, Obama was asked what he'd do in his first 100 days. The answer? After sitting down with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to figure out a strategy in Iraq, "[G]et our health care plan moving. We need a bill...by March or April to get going before the political season sets in." For those of us into the politics of this issue, that timetable is big news. Doing health care quickly is crucial. You can't lose your momentum. You can't get bogged down in the endless unknown events and unexpected crises of a presidency. You need a strategy and you need momentum and in order to preserve those things, you need to move. This is what Clinton failed to do in 1993. From my article on that fight:
At first, Clinton moved quickly to harness the moment. Less than a week after his inauguration in January of 1993, Bill Clinton created the Presidential Task Force on National Health Reform. But early speed was replaced by quick gridlock. The health care bill was finished and presented to Congress on November 20, 1993 -- almost 10 months later. By then, the economic anxieties had eased, the growth numbers had picked up, and the immediate impetus for reform had dissolved. And so the ground shifted. As the Clinton health care plan stalled in Congress and got battered by advertisements, op-eds, and business leaders, the American people found that they weren't feeling so scared anymore. Thus their status quo bias once again overtook their feelings of insecurity. The initial calculus of the Clinton plan was that Americans would be more afraid of their health coverage being changed by recession than reform. As the recession eased and unexpected economic changes looked less likely, reform grew scarier, and thus the "fierce urgency of now" that animated the 1991 discussion over health reform dissolved before a bill had even been presented.If the economic moment necessary for reform had passed, the political capital required for such a bill had long been spent on such issues and incidents as gays in the military, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Deficit Reduction Act, the beginning of Whitewater, the crisis in Haiti, and the massacre of American soldiers in Mogadishu. Some of these events were unavoidable, but all had an adverse impact on the administration's capability to pursue reform. Some, like the ill-fated battle over gays in the military, ended in defeat, diminishing the administration's momentum. Some, like the Deficit Reduction Act, were huge political lifts that required the administration to ask its congressional allies to make tough votes, risks they were not willing to repeat as the electoral storm clouds gathered. Some, like NAFTA, infuriated traditional allies within the liberal coalition, diminishing their willingness to fight for Clinton's future priorities. Some, like Haiti, simply consumed that scarcest of White House resources -- presidential attention."[Health care] never had the clear priority it needed," says Washington Post columnist David Broder. And without that priority, it missed its moment.That time spent dithering was time that enemies of the plan spent organizing. The rest, as they say, is history. Last night, Obama said he's uninterested in repeating it.
