No one thing derailed President Obama’s health care reform initiative — it took a year’s worth of miscues, blunders and hubris to deliver the effort from its early promise to near-total collapse.
Along the way, the White House created bad feelings among the supporters they snubbed, Republicans cut out of the process and the industry leaders who felt steamrolled.
While vowing to press on with his signature issue, Obama conceded that looking back, he should have finished up health care faster and done a better job of communicating the message.
“I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on the, you know this provision, or that law, or are we making a good, rational decision here, that people will get it,” Obama told ABC News.
Instead, Obama finds himself on the business end of polls showing a majority of Americans don’t share his top priority. They want more effort on the economy, and most don’t like his health care plan.
Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts this week gave Republicans the 41 votes they need to block the plan in the Senate — an outcome widely received as a repudiation of both Obama and his health care initiative.
From its start, the White House strategy relied on a fundamental misreading of former President Clinton’s health care reform failure from the 1990s.
Eager to avoid Clinton’s mistake of handing Congress a finished policy, Obama sought lawmakers’ buy-in by allowing them to craft their own.
But even that plan overlooked a pervasive public distrust of Congress, exacerbated by the inevitable partisan feuds that spun out of the effort and culminated in a series of angry, divisive town hall meetings around the country in August.
With the country still fatigued from the Bush administration, Obama undertook a complex and expensive restructuring of an industry that represents nearly a fifth of the economy. It was not a formula for building trust and support.
“The president obviously knew from the beginning of this that finding the solution to a very complex problem would be a challenging one,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “Obviously, Tuesday resulted in new political circumstances.”
But many of the administration’s wounds were self-inflicted. The highly scripted public appearances Obama’s handlers organized did little for the public relations effort, at times featuring planted questions from campaign supporters.
The White House, which frequently operates in campaign mode, was counting on the kind of activism that helped elect Obama to rally once again for health care reform — but it didn’t materialize.
Through a series of political compromises to make reform happen, the administration angered and alienated liberals in its own party, and union groups that were the earliest and strongest backers of overhauling health care.
And unlike the campaign, where Obama had the podium to himself, on health care he faced a high-volume opposition from Republicans in Congress. Obama conceded that his own, frequently distant and hands-off style didn’t help, either.
“What I haven’t always been successful at doing is breaking through the noise and speaking directly to the American people,” Obama said. “I think we lost some of that sense.”
