A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
Despite continued quarreling among Clinton’s aides about whether to attack the appointment, Bill capitulated a few days later. “Everybody else has talked about that,” he said. “I’ll cooperate with whoever’s picked. I just want to get it done.”
Hillary asked Cutler what kind of hat he was going to eat.
THE STARR appointment, so soon after the hopeful news in Fiske’s report, plunged both Hillary and Bill into gloom. Both were edgy, dark, and frustrated. Moreover, for the first time, aides could see that Hillary was frightened. Bill was usually the more optimistic, but the price he was paying for putting Hillary in charge of health care was becoming clear. He recognized that the investigative focus on her and Whitewater, especially the ridicule and derision heaped on her because of the commodities trading episode, was making success at her assignment almost impossible. Her prominence in his administration was untenable in the eyes of his economic aides and many allies on Capitol Hill, he now recognized. He also blamed himself for not accepting the advice of Pat Moynihan and others to wait until after the 1994 election to push for health care, and only after the enactment of welfare reform. Both he and Hillary could tell by summer that the Democrats were heading toward electoral difficulty, even disaster, if they could not slow down the investigative train and somehow rev the engine of health care reform. Neither possibility seemed likely.
When he had appointed Hillary to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, Bill had not only promised to submit a comprehensive reform bill to Congress in one hundred days, but he had also pledged that health care would stand as the fundamental achievement of the Clinton presidency. In one of the most memorable moments of his presidency, after the Clintons’ return from Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1993, he’d stood in front of the cameras and explained the relationship between health care, his economic plan, and deficit reduction: “Our competitiveness, our whole economy, the integrity of the way the government works, and, ultimately, our living standards, depend upon our ability to achieve savings without harming the quality of health care.” He’d taken from his pocket a blue plastic card the size of a credit card. Under the plan Hillary was developing, “Every American would receive a health care security card that will guarantee a comprehensive package of benefits over the course of an entire lifetime, roughly comparable to the benefit package offered by most Fortune 500 companies,” he promised.
For a night at least, tens of millions of Americans thought that the country was finally going to get universal health care. That it never happened was largely Hillary’s doing, though it is impossible to separate that failure from the siege of the Clinton White House enabled by Whitewater.
Still, she was largely to blame for the political failure. “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life,” declared Bob Boorstin, a former reporter for the New York Times who joined the Clinton campaign as a writer and became Hillary’s deputy for media relations on the task force. “And, it’s her great flaw, it’s what killed health care, in addition to their joint stupid decision to give it to Ira Magaziner, and to keep it within their friends, and timing, and all sorts of other things, but generally speaking I think you can say at the core of it was her self-righteousness.”
THE HIGH POINT of Hillary’s health care accomplishment had been her appearance before committees of the House and Senate in September 1993, upon the Clintons’ return from Martha’s Vineyard. For a week, Hillary awed lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Over the three days, she appeared before Dan Rostenkowski’s House Ways and Means Committee, John Dingell’s House Energy and Commerce Committee, Ted Kennedy’s Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, William Ford’s House Education and Labor Committee, and Pat Moynihan’s Senate Finance Committee. Even Moynihan was impressed, though he remained skeptical. After she finished her session with Rostenkowski’s committee, the congressman kissed her and said, “In the very near future, the president will be known as your husband.” On day two, Hillary’s plan won its first Republican endorsement. “I am pleased to be the first. I am absolutely confident I will not be the last,” said Jim Jeffords of Vermont.
It was Hillary’s beatification. In each hearing room she sat perfectly poised at a witness table before the committee members, few of whom had reputations for self-effacement. They were seated in a semicircle on a riser, as if to make witnesses before them smaller. Her manner was persuasive, confident, and calm. “I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman,” she told the House Ways and Means Committee. “I’m here as an American citizen concerned about the health of her family and the health of her nation.” She sat forward in her chair and answered more than 150 questions from the members, never consulting notes or the aides sitting behind her. Her preparation was textbook perfect. Her humor, and even a brief willingness to roll with the punches, was on display.
The only House member who had challenged her seriously was Republican representative Dick Armey of Texas, who referred to her health care plan as a “Kevorkian prescription for the jobs of American men and women.” *21 Armey, a deputy to the Republican whip, Newt Gingrich, had also said of the first lady, “Her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around with a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.” In the hearing room, Armey began his cross-examination of Hillary with a promise to make the health care debate “as exciting as possible.”
“I’m sure you will do that, Mr. Armey,” Hillary said. Laughter filled the hearing room.
“We’ll do the best we can,” said Armey.
“You and Dr. Kevorkian.”
“I have been told about your charm and wit,” Armey replied when the laughter subsided, “and let me say, the reports of your charm are overstated and the reports on your wit are understated.”
The week may have been the pinnacle of her career as first lady. Hillary was making history, and there were comparisons on the floor of Congress to Martha Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, and, in one particularly tortured leap of logic, Abraham Lincoln. Freshman congresswoman Lynn Schenk of California described her own mother’s admiration for Hillary. “Not since Eleanor Roosevelt has she so admired a woman in public life—and my mother is not a woman who admires easily.” “I hope my mother is listening,” Hillary replied, grinning.
The New York Times editorialized on Sunday, “Hillary Rodham Clinton dazzled five Congressional committees last week, advocating health care legislation in the most impressive testimony on as complete a program as anyone could remember, and raising hopes that an issue that had stymied Congress for fifty years was now near solution.” Mary McGrory of the Washington Post wrote, “It’s a long way to Tipperary on getting health care through Congress. But Mrs. Clinton has made a brilliant beginning. She is a superstar.” She was forty-six years old. Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times, “It was, in a way, the official end of the era in which presidential wives pretended to know less than they did and to be advising less than they were.” Newt Gingrich was on the mark as well when he said, “If Ira Magaziner had tried to defend that same plan, he would have been destroyed.”
Hillary’s critics had long complained of her tendency to be too clever by half. Nothing demonstrated the point better than her decision soon after to send a copy of the bill she and Magaziner were developing to a friendly California congressman, knowing it would be leaked to the press. The bill was purported to reduce the deficit by $91 billion, a preposterous assertion given the huge dimensions of the program they had devised.
Representatives of Congress, especially Democrats, were incredulous at having been kept out of the loop and then reading about her proposal in the Washington Post, before they had been properly informed and briefed themselves. “My colleagues who have taken the time to go look at [the leaked proposal] are kind of appalled by the complexity of it all. It’s magic. It is a house-of-cards kind of financing that is going to fall apart when people start to poke at it,” said Democratic representative Jim McDermott of Washington. Even more damag
Bob Dole took easy advantage of the situation on Meet the Press. “I can’t believe they’re having hearings on a plan that nobody has seen and we may not see for another thirty days…. I think it’s unprecedented.”
Lloyd Bentsen felt compelled to tell the Post on background that he was postponing his testimony “until the legislation is complete” and the numbers were available to him. He reached Hillary directly and insisted that Treasury Department experts have the opportunity to verify the economic and cost assumptions of the package the administration would submit to Congress. Leon Panetta also directed that the Office of Management and Budget review the figures. Others could see that the bottom was falling out of Hillary’s health care boat; not her.
She had publicly promised during her brief ascendancy to submit a finished bill by mid-October. Now she was restrained by the requirement of input from Treasury, OMB, and other cabinet members. Seeing that a deadline would once again be missed, she stalled. The delay produced one of the more outlandish episodes of modern congressional history, in a curiously ostentatious ceremony at Statuary Hall on October 27. The occasion had been intended to mark the delivery of her health care bill to Congress. The president stood at the lectern and pounded his fist, expressing his desire to provide universal health care to all Americans. But there was no bill.
“I don’t remember if it was four weeks, eight weeks, or ten weeks, but it became obvious pretty soon that the opponents had successfully characterized the plan as the government taking over health care,” Roger Altman recalled. “And once that became clear, you knew that the plan, more or less as proposed, was not going to happen.”
Instead of being the new administration’s strongest suit, health care reform—desired by an overwhelming majority of Americans, according to virtually every poll on the subject—had become a rallying cry for all the Clintons’ opponents and enemies, providing a single issue that mainstream Republicans, the far right, and conspiracy-minded anti-Clinton zealots could agree on. It also gave more self-interested enemies of universal, government-supervised health care—many doctors, insurance companies, owners of small businesses, and individual constituents—a chance to mobilize. Hillary and Magaziner had attempted to woo interest groups—medical, professional, small business—early in the process, but once these constituencies got a look at what was going to be included in the bill, they withdrew.
WHEN REPUBLICAN 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-legitimi
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.”
WHEN, 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.