Obama May Pay Price By Pushing ‘Political Chips’ on Health Care
By Edwin Chen and Julianna Goldman
March 22 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama achieved what every Democratic president since Harry Truman has attempted when the U.S. House passed a health-care overhaul. Now he’ll find out what price he and his party may pay for the victory.
The bill’s passage, which affects 17 percent of the nation’s economy, came without a single Republican vote, a measure of the partisan divide over the issue that has fueled distrust of Congress and damaged Obama’s approval ratings.
“There’s no doubt that he’s pushed a lot of his political chips in the middle of the table,” David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, said in an interview. “If we had not been successful, I think there would have been a lot of crepe hanging in this town, and most of the crepe would have been hung on this building. And he knew that.”
“What was on trial here was not just whether we could solve the health-care problem, but whether we could solve any problem,” Axelrod said.
Republicans complain about both the substance of the $940 billion bill and the process by which it was passed. Democrats considered how to defend their vote for it during this year’s congressional election campaigns.
“This obviously is hugely important to the president, but you have to realize that there are some people who took a vote that will probably cost them their election,” said New York Representative Anthony Weiner, a Democrat. “I hope that the administration sees this as not only a triumphant moment, but also a little bit of a humbling one.”
Scale Back
Obama will likely be forced to scale back energy and climate-change legislation, several House members said.
In remarks last night after the House acted, Obama thanked Democrats for rising “above the weight of our politics.”
“This wasn’t an easy vote for a lot of people, but it was the right vote,” he said at the White House.
At one point in January, when his prospects looked bleak, the president said he’d be willing to serve just one term if that was the cost of delivering on health care, which he has made the center of his domestic agenda.
He persisted as one obstacle followed another: Deadlines came and went, and finally his party lost a Massachusetts Senate seat held by the late Edward Kennedy since 1962, after Republican Scott Brown campaigned against Obama’s plan.
After Brown’s victory deprived Democrats of the 60 Senate votes they needed to stop Republican delaying tactics, some top aides urged Obama to seek a less-sweeping health-care overhaul while Republicans stepped up their calls to start over.
Obama rejected that advice. The legislation he’s about to sign will provide coverage for tens of millions of Americans, impose “the toughest insurance reforms in history,” as he put it on March 20, and set the U.S. on course toward universal medical insurance.
‘Opportunity Cost’
Still, Obama’s victory leaves him depleted. “There has been a large ‘opportunity cost’ that the president and the Democratic Party have paid for going down this road,” said William Galston, a onetime domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Obama is unlikely to find either Democratic or Republican willingness to work on issues of mutual concern.
“The president just has a limited ability to ask Democrats to cast any more tough votes going forward,” said Vin Weber, a Republican strategist and former congressman from Minnesota.
Said Representative Baron Hill, an Indiana Democrat, “I feel like I am walking the plank.”
“In the short term, it’s going to cost me,” Hill said. “It remains to be seen whether or not people will see the benefits that are in the bill 10 years out.”
‘Huge Price’
Obama and Democratic allies have already begun selling those benefits, convinced that many consumer-protection features will become evident later this year -- and be appreciated before Election Day.
To be sure, not all Republicans say the president’s victory presages gains for their party in the November midterm elections.
“I believe the Democrats should pay a huge price for this,” said Darrell Issa, a California Republican, “but I am not going to predict that they will.”
Within his own party, Obama used the soft power of persuasion more than the arm-twisting associated with Lyndon Johnson, aides and advisers said.
The vote brought him closer than any president to putting the U.S. on a path to universal health coverage. In November 1945, seven months into his presidency, Truman proposed a national health-care program.
‘Unpopular Votes’
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the health-care debate wouldn’t cause Obama to think small, arguing that the administration’s successes are cumulative.
Some analysts disagree with that calculation.
The president, starting with the economic-stimulus bill, “pushed Democrats into casting a lot of unpopular votes,” said George Edwards, a presidential historian at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. “And now people will be saying: ‘Don’t ask me to cast more that are going to end my career.’”
Edwards said the divisions created by the health-care fight create some possibilities. Obama may “emphasize things that have more support, that are less divisive, that are more positive -- jobs and the economy,” he said.
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