There's lots to talk about in Josh Biven's exegesis of the difference between left and center-left economists, but let's start here:
During the Faux/Sperling debate, a particularly contentious subject was the fate of the Clinton health care plan. The Clinton health care plan (whatever else its overarching benefits and demerits, and I'm more kindly disposed towards its merits than many of my peers on left) was designed to minimize the visible hand of government and to preserve the role of insurance companies and employers in acting as intermediaries. Single-payer options were ruled out from word go. The plan's boosters would argue this maximized its political prospects; critics of it from the left argued that this froze them out from the beginning and robbed the push for universal care of enthusiastic support from its most natural constituencies.
Going back even further into the Clinton presidency, the push to pass NAFTA before embarking on serious efforts to move health care was subject to a similar debate. Proponents of NAFTA-first argued that it showed that the Clintonites were bi-partisan and pro-business, which they hoped would inoculate them from later charges of wanting to impose the heavy hand of government in health care when this next debate began. Critics from the left (besides just not liking NAFTA) argued that it forced unions and other activists to spend money and time fighting NAFTA when they could have been fighting for health care. By the time NAFTA was over, much of universal health care's constituency was angry and/or had their resources depleted from the NAFTA fight.
The common thread in all of this, from the left point of view, is that the center-left wing relies on having responsible legislative partners in the GOP with which to do business, while taking its own left wing for granted. Our side would argue that this is (political, not just substantive) folly: the GOP is not a responsible legislative partner, and insisting on treating it as such will lead only to disappointment.
That's a pretty strong read there, and an underlearned lesson. You still see a lot of agitation in this town for compromise health reform proposals, mish-mashes of market strategies and universal mandates that, theoretically, can attract congressional creatures from all ends and edges of the spectrum.
Bull.
And the best example of why it's bull is not Bill Clinton's health care proposal, but Bill Clinton. here you have a moderate Democrat with a fetish for bipartisanism who reformed welfare, passed NAFTA, shrunk the size of government, balanced the budget, and pulled the Democratic Party into a more fiscally responsible stance and the right treated him like the second coming of FDR. For some, like Newt Gingrich, that's because they worried he was the second coming of FDR, but by 1996, that was clearly mistaken. No matter, by 1999, he was impeached, a bogeyman to right wing tots and bete noire to conservative columnists.
That's why I'm so down on Hillary Clinton's incrementalist strategy. The right has taken a lesson from their patrons in the NRA and adopted an eschatological stance on health care, treating even the smallest lurch left as the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. That, however, could be a help, if only liberals understood it freed them to fight for the policies they believe best, rather than painstakingly constructing incoherent entreaties to potential allies across the aisle.
At the end of the 1994 health care debate, speculation began centering on the Dole-Packwood plan, a piece of legislation floated by two established Republicans in order to head off ClintonCare. Once ClintonCare had been derailed, though, there was a meeting on Dole-Packwood, where Sheila Burke, his top staffer, exclaimed that Dole himself could no longer vote for Dole-Packwood. He didn't.
This isn't about policy, it's about politics. And so long as the battle lines are already drawn, liberals might as well open up with all their ammo.
