Hang around politics long enough, and you’ll start to see reruns everywhere. Fifteen years ago this month, Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a nationwide bus tour to promote her and her husband’s ultimately doomed proposal for an overhaul of U.S. health care. Wednesday, President Obama held a health-care roundtable — ultimately hard to distinguish from a campaign rally — at the Northern Virginia Community College campus in Annandale, Va., just outside the Beltway.
Hillary’s tour ran into trouble at the outset. At the second stop — in Seattle — half of the crowd of 4,500 had been urged to attend by a local radio-talk-show host, and they vocally opposed her plan. The New York Times reported that she “struggled to be heard above the cacophony of shouts, boos, and whistles.” In Portland, Ore., a plane appeared above the event with the banner, “Beware the Phony Express.” Nigel Hamilton wrote in his biography of Bill Clinton that “when the caravan reached the first highway, there was a broken-down bus swathed in red tape and bearing a forbidding notice: ‘This Is Clinton Health Care.’”
There was nothing quite so theatrical at Obama’s event, although someone had lined a nearby wall with small posters that looked like the Obama campaign logo with a hammer and sickle in the center. More than an hour before the roundtable began, a lone young man in an Obama T-shirt waved a sign that said, “Real Reform Is . . . a Public Insurance Option.” With the administration indicating that the president strongly prefers a public plan but won’t reject a final bill that doesn’t include it, even those still wearing Obama T-shirts are left conditionally protesting their own leader.
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The event was touted as a national Internet conversation, with the president taking questions submitted via e-mail, Twitter, and YouTube. But on the White House’s Facebook page, the video feed was spotty at best. Response comments streamed in, such as “If our White House is so rich and powerful, why can’t they stream video?” and “They can’t even stream a town hall correctly, you want them in charge of health care?” Whenever the video stream paused or was interrupted, it picked up and attempted to make up for lost time by playing at a faster speed, turning the president’s usually perfectly timed cadence into Porky Pig.
One needed good audio quality to detect the minute shifts and hedges in Obama’s stance on what health-care legislation should and should not include. Early on, he cited figures from the Congressional Budget Office — an unusual source, since the CBO offered some of the toughest analysis of the ideas Obama wants in his plan, declaring that just the portion it had analyzed would cost at least $1 trillion and bring coverage to only another 16 million people. Obama later said that the savings generated under his health-care plan “aren’t scorable” under CBO’s calculations. Perhaps they’re invisible.
Speaking to the American Medical Association last month, Obama said that there was no way enactment of his reform plan could result in Americans who are happy with their current coverage losing that coverage. There was not much room for interpretation: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” But Wednesday, Obama hedged a bit, saying only that he “wanted” Americans to be able to keep their current plans.
At the Annandale event, he was asked about taxing health benefits provided by employers. On the campaign trail, John McCain proposed a similar idea, to be partially offset by a tax credit; Obama lacerated his opponent over this with $44 million spent on 16 attack ads in every major swing state. But Wednesday, the president would say only that his preference was to cap the benefits, or to permit a tax on them past a certain amount.
Back in the White House, CBS’s Chip Reid and Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas took umbrage at the White House’s ultimate control over the questions asked at the event. Reid noted that “even if there’s a tough question, it’s a question coming from somebody who was invited or who was screened or the question was screened.” Indeed, three early questions came from a single-payer advocate, a representative of the liberal activist group Health Care for America Now, and a member of the Service Employees International Union, the last of whom essentially asked, “What can I do to help you?”
