At moment of truth, Hillary turns backwards

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The very essence of President Clinton's approach to domestic problems was his willingness to compromise to remove the political footballs both parties liked to kick around at election time and get something concrete accomplished instead.

By balancing the budget, reforming welfare and passing important anti-crime legislation, he boldly took potentially lucrative campaign issues away from both his partisans and his opponents and left historic achievements behind in their place.

The Senate Democrats faced just such a decision June 27: whether to preserve intact their key election issue, prescription drugs for the elderly, or accept legislation that went far — but not all the way — toward accomplishing their goal. The resulting vote separated the partisans from the patriots.

The former, eager to win elections, decided to try to kill any real progress in the hopes of harvesting the votes of needy elderly. The latter, conscious that history hung in the balance, decided to seize the historic opportunity to relieve the anxiety and pain of America's elderly and vote for what amounts to half-price drugs.

Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) led the way by insisting on taking half a loaf. When President Bush abandoned the traditional Republican effort to emasculate Medicare by transforming it into a private insurance program, Kennedy and Daschle recognized the historic nature of Bush's concession and realized that such a chance to move ahead may not come again.

But Hillary Clinton chose to remain among the extreme partisans. After the failure of her healthcare initiative of 1993-94, we had all assumed that she had modified her Maoist all-or-nothing approach and was committed to accepting incremental change. In that spirit, she backed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill for portable health benefits, even though it fell far short of the utopia she had designed the year before.

But now, breaking with fellow Democrat Charles Schumer (the senator who really is from New York), she has opted to obstruct progress and deny the elderly any relief at all so as to keep the partisan issue alive. Perhaps she will take time out from her $8 million book tour to reflect on how hard it must be for the elderly to pay for prescription drugs without any federal assistance.

Had Bush demanded fundamental changes in Medicare and insisted on using the elderly's need for medicine to drive them to HMOs or other private insurance plans and demolish fee-for-service Medicare, Hillary would have been right to vote no. But once Bush agreed to put prescription drug coverage under traditional Medicare and advocated a package similar in total cost to that urged by the Democrats, the justification for her opposition vanished.

House Democrats marched in their usual lockstep to the beat of their campaign committee to kill the compromise plan so as to keep the issue going for two more years. The ultraconservative House Republicans voted for the purist ideology to continue the assault on Medicare begun by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in the mid-'90s.

Both House Democrats and Hillary would rather sacrifice the prescription drug benefit to make one last attempt to win votes on Election Day. The ultraconservatives would give them up to push their revisionist view of Medicare. But last Friday was the day that separated the realists from the ideologues, the pragmatists from the opportunists, the sincere from the political. Why could Hillary not accept what Kennedy, Schumer, and Daschle found acceptable?

In the ongoing dialogue between Hillary's head and heart, between her pragmatic understanding of the need to compromise and her impulsive support for sweeping and radical change, the heart won. When she runs for president in 2008, couching herself as a pragmatic moderate, let's all remember that when the chips were down, she voted to keep kicking the political football rather than give elderly federal assistance in buying medicine.

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JWR contributor Dick Morris is the author of, among others, Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business" Comment by clicking here.

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