Harry Reid worked with Rahm Emanuel to bring Bill Clinton to the Senate today for a pointed reminder about the critical, historical effort they are working on, and to rally them to move forward.
On Tuesday, the 42nd President is set to brief lawmakers for roughly two hours. The goal, said a Democratic Senate aide with knowledge of the arrangement, was not, specifically, to pitch the benefits of passing legislation to conservative Democrats.
"It really wasn't," the aide said. "It really was that they just wanted to bring in somebody who had been there and done that; somebody who has been in the trenches, who would tell them, 'Don't give up now.'"
Brian Beutler reports on the results:
After an hour-long lunch with the Senate Democratic caucus, former President Bill Clinton found himself surrounded by dozens of reporters, and summarized his message as one of the urgency of action. "The worst thing to do is nothing," Clinton said of the party's health care reform push. "We can do so much better."
As they emerged from the lunch one by one, a number of senators echoed this rendering.
"His message was very simply it is so important that this be done, that there are so many people, I think 30 percent of the population he said at one point or another, don't have any health care coverage," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told TPMDC, "and so the ability to fix the problem is really upon us."
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To members who are facing tough re-election races next year (such as fellow Arkansas native Blanche Lincoln) Clinton's message was equally simple: "You're going to do it, and then people are going to begin to see that none of the bad things that people are talking about will come to pass, essentially," Feinstein said.
Conservative Democrat Ben Nelson didn't necessarily agree. "Failure could be passing a bad bill," Nelson told TPMDC. "I think it's important that we try to put together the best bill that's possible, and see what it consists of and then I can make a decision whether I'll support it or not."
"I think he made a good point about good governance are the best politics. A good bill will be good politics," Nelson added.
It seems like everyone heard what they wanted to hear on this one. Of course, Ben Nelson's vision of a "good" bill is not going to conform to Jay Rockefeller's or Sherrod Brown's. From an electoral standpoint, what they all need to remember is that 2010, like every non-presidential election year--is going to be about base mobilization and not giving Ben Nelson his dream bill.