A headline in The Washington Post following the announcement of next week’s big presidential speech on health care said it well: “Address to Congress is effort to seize control of the debate.”
The White House’s arrogant belief in the power of Obama the Orator is contradicted by the two greatest American orators of the last 80 years, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both these leaders knew that in a free society, presidents can shape and guide debate, but they can’t “control” it. The danger for a president who seeks to control the debate is that the country will ultimately repudiate him.
Such is the situation President Obama finds himself in now.
His speech next Wednesday is the most consequential of his presidency since the inaugural. Eight months of a non-stimulative $787 stimulus bill, a budget that will double the national debt in the next five years, and a high-tax, big bureaucracy cap-and-trade bill have translated into a 12-point drop in Democratic party affiliation, according to one poll.
Obama is facing a huge tidal wave of American opinion away from bigger government and toward solutions we can understand and believe in. Riding this wave is still possible. Controlling it is a losing proposition.
And so the President faces an historic choice.
One option is to use his speech next week to cleverly repackage the current, 1,000-plus page, liberal health care bill; to try to control the debate by wrapping the same old, big-government plan in prettier rhetorical paper.
But the history of health care reform so far – party line votes and demonizing opponents – doesn’t bode well for this strategy. If Obama thinks he can use his cleverness and his oratory to make Americans think he is backing away from a big-government plan when he’s not, he should think again.
In the age of the internet and talk radio, Lincoln’s maxim is more true than ever: You can’t fool all Americans all of the time.
The other option is to try to guide and shape the debate by slowing down, opening up the process, and taking things one step at a time; to stop trying to invent new ways to get Americans to listen to him, and instead actually listen to Americans.
Sixteen years ago, in the spring of 1993, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton came to me to talk about health care reform. I told her then what I would tell President Obama today: It’s impossible to write a comprehensive health care reform bill and get it passed. Politicians aren’t that smart, Americans aren’t that trusting, and special interests aren’t that lazy.
Instead of trying to pass a single bill that attempts to remake one-sixth of the American economy, Obama could use his speech to announce a series of four or five bills to reform our health care system, each written in a bipartisan way and debated in open hearings with open rules.
A step-by-step approach would make both sides more accountable. It would eliminate the opportunity for Democrats to bury bad programs in a mammoth, unreadable bill, and it would obligate Republicans to come to the table with their own reform ideas.
One set of hearings and one bill could focus on improving the delivery and administration of health care, including tort reform and rewarding providers for individual health and wellness.
Another bill could address creating real competition and choice in the insurance market by creating a nationwide market for insurance.
A separate bill could focus on saving Medicare and Medicaid from bankruptcy by finding ways to eliminate what the Center for Health Transformation estimates is $70-120 billion in fraud and abuse each year.
And a fourth bill could explore ways of investing in science and innovation, like reforming the FDA’s hopelessly long and needlessly complicated approval process for new medicines.
Each of these bills is more understandable, more doable, and more democratic than the take-it-or-leave-it strategy that has been employed so far.
So Obama has a choice to make Wednesday night.
He can listen to us.
Or he can demand we listen to him.
Either way, we’ll get the last word.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see newt.org. His exclusive column for The Examiner appears Fridays.
