Looming over the Obama White House's healthcare strategy has been the specter of 1993 and 1994, when Bill Clinton failed to accomplish healthcare reform and the Democrats lost both Houses of Congress.
The Obama White House is, of course, sensible to try to learn from the experience of the first two Clinton years. But its ability to do so has been hampered by the fact that the lessons are largely being drawn by former Clinton insiders themselves, most notably of course White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the lessons drawn by the Obama White House largely concern political tactics and tend to reaffirm the basic strategic and ideological tendencies of the Clinton White House: triangulate; pander to the "center"; ignore the policy desires of the progressive base, while taking them politically for granted and, occasionally, scoring political points by attacking them.
In short, the Obama White House has entirely failed to learn the real lessons of the '94 elections: if the Republicans go into a midterm with an energized and organized base and the Democrats go into them with a disorganized and demoralized base, the Republicans will win.
What demoralized the Democratic base in 1994?
The failure to pass a healthcare reform certainly didn't help. But long before Clinton's plan failed, the healthcare reform process pursued by Clinton and his healthcare team (most notably Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner) shut out progressives, inside and outside Congress. While industry representatives got a seat at the table, single payer advocates were excluded. The demoralization associated with healthcare reform in 1993 ended with the bill's failure, but it didn't start there.
And arguably the failure of healthcare reform wasn't the biggest demoralizing factor for progressives in the fall of 1994. As Jane Hamsher reminds us in passing (in an excellent piece on the Van Jones debacle and what she calls the "Veal Pen," the way in which the Obama White House has largely coopted and neutralized criticism from many progressive advocacy groups), the '94 elections happened hot on the heels of the passage of NAFTA, a major accomplishment of the Clinton White House, but one which infuriated progressives. (On a personal note, I should add that Jane's mention of NAFTA really resonated with me, as it was a key moment in my disillusionment with the Democratic Party, which I would leave a few years later following another singular accomplishment of the Clinton Administration: welfare "reform.")
The Obama White House may believe that the biggest political threat Democrats face would involve the failure to pass some sort of health care reform. But I think they're wrong.
On a whole host of fronts, the Obama White House has pursued policies that anger both left and right, from the financial bailout to the War in Afghanistan (now opposed by over half of the American public). Of course, right wing anger at Obama will be a motivating factor in Republican GOTV efforts in 2010. Liberal anger at Obama will complicate and depress Democratic turnout.
The passage of a healthcare "reform" bill that creates an individual mandate with no public option is not only terrible policy making. It's terrible politics. It would anger the right and the left....with a predictable electoral effect in 2010. Even fairly establishment bloggers like Josh Marshall are coming to this conclusion.
And the saddest thing about this particular mistake is that, in a misplaced effort to avoid the mistakes of '93 and '94, a public option-free "reform" plan would almost certainly reproduce them.
Let's hope the White House will belatedly learn the actual lessons of 1994 and attend to its electoral base before it's too late.