Okay, so I wasn't there when the deal went down, so I can't 100 percent vouch for the quote I'm presenting. My ambition is not to settle the debate about whether she ruined health care reform back in the early 1990s. My hope is to further the public debate about that. I think her performance then is crucial to understanding her suitability to be president.
What follows is a quote from Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Monthly piece, Take Two: Hillary's Choice. It concerns Jim Cooper, the Tennessee Congressman who helped create an alternative to Hillary's health care plan. He's a conservative, and Hillary supporters are tough on him, arguing that his plan contained no real reform. On to the quote.
One Saturday in late September, Schneider, Cooper, and Bill Clinton set out for an early-morning round of golf at the Army-Navy Club. Discussion soon turned to health care. Ever the deal maker, Clinton started probing Cooper for the possibility of a compromise. "Clinton was an artist at negotiation," says one member of the group. "There was a lot of common ground there, and he had a good sense of the public mood about health care."
It started to drizzle, so Clinton invited the group back to the White House, where the talk continued into the afternoon over beers. Cooper canceled a trip to Tennessee and kept listening. By the time he left that evening, says the source, "it was very close to a handshake." Clinton’s parting words were, "Look, I think we can make this work. But Hillary’s leading this, and you’ll need to have a meeting with her."
Cooper agreed. But when he met with the first lady shortly thereafter, it was as if the golf outing had been just a dream. "She was looking for Jim to surrender 100 percent," says one source with knowledge of the meeting. "It was brutal," Cooper told me. Things collapsed quickly, and no deal was struck. Hillary Clinton’s major initiative died ignominiously many months later, without even coming to a vote.
Part of what intrigued me about the above passage is that Clinton seemed so deferential to Hillary that he couldn't rescue the compromise he had forged. I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall when the two of them discussed the compromise.
Again, I'm not trying to shove this down everybody's throat as though it were decisive proof. I'm just trying to further the debate about who she really is.
To many of us, her current scorched earth approach to campaigning against Obama seems a re-emergence of the kind of vitriol she demonstrated many times in during the 1993-1994. To us, it seems that she just doesn't have the temperament needed to forge the kind of consensus needed to make real reforms.