History is replete with examples, both great and small, in which
a sudden shift in strategy has borne great dividends. In the 1934
NFL Championship Game, the so-called Sneakers Game, the trailing
Giants attempted to cope with an icy field by switching from
cleats to sneakers in the second half. Trailing 13-3 in the 3rd
quarter, the Giants subsequently scored 27 unanswered points and
beat the Bears 30-13. The lesson: Unanticipated conditions often
require unexpected tactics.
Another example, which might resonate with President Obama and
congressional Democrats, took place in 1996. A fresh-faced young
Democratic president, Bill Clinton, ran as the man from Hope. But
his attempt to facilitate a government takeover of the American
health-care system led to his running into serious political
difficulties with the American people. In the election of 1994,
his party lost both the House and the Senate.
Subsequent to the takeover, Republicans and a minority of
congressional Democrats advanced “workfare,” a long-overdue
welfare-reform effort. But Clinton had twice vetoed such
legislation. Just months before the 1996 election, however,
Clinton signed the bill with relatively minor changes. The move
angered liberals in his own party. But this bipartisan
legislation became one of his administration’s signature
achievements and contributed greatly to his being reelected. A
sudden shift toward genuine bipartisanship paid great dividends.
Alas, President Obama’s recently announced health-care summit is
not such a shift. Within hours of the announcement, a White House
official, no doubt nervous about complaints from the Left, told
the Washington Post that the Blair House summit on
health care “is not starting over.… Don’t make any mistake about
that.” The official added that “We are coming with our plan.”
In truth, if the president wants his latest unorthodox maneuver
(announced in an unorthodox manner) to look like more than a
publicity stunt — or like more than a way to tempt Republicans
into another moment like Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst — then he
must embrace a new and genuinely bipartisan path. He needs to
embrace an approach that would lower health costs, rather than
raise them; give Americans more, rather than less, control over
their health-care dollars; and decrease the number of uninsured
much more efficiently — in a manner that wouldn’t break the bank
or rob from already nearly-fiscally insolvent Medicare.
In other words, a true shift in strategy, and serious
bipartisanship, would require first scrapping his failed
government-centric overhaul that Americans have so resoundingly
rejected.
If the Democrats were to embrace this course, they would soon
become aware of a wide variety of simpler options that could
garner bipartisan support and accomplish their professed goal of
lowering health costs and increasing the number of Americans with
insurance coverage.
We have advanced a small-bill proposal (www.smallbill.org) that offers
seven real reforms (the last a combination of smaller reforms),
which together would lower health costs, significantly increase
the number of insured, and be deficit-neutral. The small bill
would meet the American people’s goals for health-care reform —
which the current Democratic bills would not — while costing
only about 7 percent as much as the Democratic plans. (If this
seems too good to be true, it merely shows how bad the Democratic
plans really are.)
Liberals would likely resist such a targeted, affordable
approach. Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts
Senate seat largely on the strength of his message that we scrap
the current bills and start over with an honest attempt at real
reform. In the days before Brown’s win, the New
Republic’s Jonathan Chait presented four options for the
Democrats should the Democrats lose the election. He called
starting over — which would entail heeding Brown’s advice —
“option 4: Crawl into a hole and die.”
Nevertheless, there are a lot of very vulnerable congressional
Democrats who would relish the chance to back something like the
small bill, which most congressional Republicans, and most
Americans, would enthusiastically support.
Progressives might think that starting over with a genuinely
bipartisan approach is akin to crawling into a hole and dying,
but the Democrats do need to recognize that they are already in a
hole. If President Obama and congressional Democrats were to
borrow from historical examples and employ a sudden shift in
strategy, they could get a big win and achieve meaningful reform
in the process.
If they really want a government takeover, they will never pursue
such a strategy. But if they really want to lower health costs
and increase insurance coverage — as the President claims —
then now is the time for a sudden shift toward a truly
bipartisan, sensible, small-bill approach.
