If President Obama can remake America’s health care system this fall, a lot of people will naturally ask: Why, again, couldn’t Bill and Hillary Clinton accomplish this in 1993? So I’ve been wondering when Bill Clinton would show up to explain, in advance, why Obama might be about to succeed where he failed.

Here it comes.

As he watches the new Democratic president take on the issue that stymied him 16 years ago, Mr. Clinton has concluded that Mr. Obama has a better chance than he did, both because of the way the new proposals are structured and because of a national mood that is more supportive of major action.

What’s missing from that analysis? Enough self-criticism, for starters. It’s the national mood! It’s the different mix of proposals! Yes, probably both are true, but also true is that Obama is methodically engaging Congress instead of doing what Bill and Hillary did, which was draft a health care reform plan in secret, dump it on Congress, and demand immediate passage. Funny how that didn’t work so well.

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

10 replies on “Clinton on Obama’s Health Care Push”

  1. If that’s what you want to believe. The way I saw it was the Republican’s along with big pharma and big insurance torpedoed it because profit for them was more important than the American people’s overall health. When you can take people’s homes and propety because they’ve become ill, you aren’t about to let a lot of do gooders take that away.

  2. @ #1 As much as I despise the efforts by insurance companies to demonize any form of national health care, the way the Clintons went about putting forth their health care reform package was politically incompetent. Congress wasn’t just objecting to the content of the package, they were pissed off at how it was handled. They wanted to have a voice in how the package was formed, and many Dems offered their own competing health care reform bills because of this. Blaming it all on the Republicans and the insurance companies/pharma doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.

  5. I have never understood why so many people thought Clinton was so wonderful. It was in large part due to his methodology of pushing health care reform that destroyed the Democratic majority in 1994; a majority they held for decades and even now the Democrats are only now starting to recover from.

    Like Mike Malloy says Bill Clinton was the greatest Republican President we ever had.

  6. Clinton was a mediocre president…not bad enough to be bad and a paucity of major accomplishment, unless you want to count banging interns.

  7. Much has been written about that failure, and much of what has been written is — like this post and comments — dumb as dirt.

  8. I don’t see why you’re attacking Bill Clinton, Eli. He’s not the enemy. At least he tried. And we’ve learned from his mistakes & use that information to help with the current proposal. It’s like blaming early gay-rights pioneers for not being 100% successful. It must’ve been a personality problem for those loser gay-rights advocates from the ’70’s

  9. There is another way of looking at these same facts, which is that Obama gets bills passed by allowing them to be bad bills. For the stimulus package, he said to congress “write a bill that spends $750B and has ‘stimulus’ in the title” and he got one, a very bad one. For health care reform, he is saying to congress “write a bill that spends $750B and has ‘health care’ in the title” and he will get one, and there is little reason to believe it will do anything well besides spend a lot of money. Congress, left to its own devices, will never write focused, efficient legislation.

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