yesterday exploring Hillary Clinton's role in the ill-fated 'Clinton
Care' push of the early 1990s. Might her dogged pursuit of an even more invasive government intrusion into healthcare come back to haunt her in a 2016 presidential bid -- especially if public attitudes
on the issue remain sour? It's certainly conceivable, but I suspect
her more recent healthcare positions and rhetoric are more likely to
play a salient role in a future campaign. Given how closely President
Obama's brand is associated with Obamacare, it's easy to forget that he
was once a staunch opponent of what would eventually become his
signature legislative legacy project. During the bruising Democratic
primaries of 2007 and 2008, Obama clobbered rival Hillary Clinton
over her support for an individual mandate -- which was the tent pole
of her healthcare proposal. His blistering critiques sometimes crossed
into outright derision:
"I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting healthcare. The problem is they can't afford it."
Lo and behold, by 2009, Obama found himself embracing the very mandate he'd spent the previous year fashioning into the key
domestic policy difference between himself and his former opponent. In
an instant, Hillarycare became Obamacare. Hillary Clinton may hope to
quietly back away from her brainchild as she devises some talking points
to sidestep its failures. If she eventually claims that she would have
sold her plan in a more forthright and honest way, Republicans can note
that she helped pioneer a certain blanket assurance for which Obama is now paying a major political price:
Surprise. At the time, candidate Clinton was trying
to blunt GOP attacks that succeeded in bringing down her previous big
government healthcare project. Hillarycare 1.0 would have been more disruptive
than Hillarycare 2.0 to people's existing coverage arrangements, so she
tweaked things to give her the space to tell wary consumers that their
plans and doctors would not be affected by her new reform proposal.
This promise was always impossible to keep, as we've all learned the
hard way. In the end, Hillary's best defense may be that had she been
president, she would have implemented the system more competently than
Obama has. (A low bar). The beauty of this argument is that it's a
hypothetical that's impossible to disprove. But we might be able to
extrapolate some things based on past performance? How, for instance,
did Clinton's hands-off executive leadership serve the Benghazi four? And don't forget this disgusting performance, which she knew was a sham at the time. Would she follow-through on essential tasks better than Obama? She didn't here. If any of these questions become a drag on her potential White House run, perhaps she'll employ her go-to buck-passing rhetorical question: "What difference, at this point, does it make?" I discussed the Hillarycare/Obamacare nexus on Fox News yesterday afternoon:
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