Bill and Hillary by William H. Chafe

Author:William H. Chafe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NINE

The Health Care Debacle and the Emergence of Kenneth Starr

Eleven months after the White House decided to say no to The Washington Post’s request for the Whitewater records, the voters of America rendered their own verdict on the first two years of the Clinton administration. In November 1994, Democrats suffered a crushing defeat, losing fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives and eight in the U.S. Senate. Republicans were now in charge of both bodies. Although similar midterm reversals had happened three other times in post–World War II America, the sense of devastation in the Clinton White House was palpable. Bill Clinton could not believe his party had lost Congress. Hillary was in despair.

The election results mirrored the many mistakes the Clintons had made during the first two years. Despite the achievements of the Clinton deficit reduction package, NAFTA, AmeriCorps, the Brady Bill, and family leave, the media was dominated by stories suggesting disarray—the flap over gays in the military, the early exclusion of the press from the White House, Travelgate, the Foster suicide, and questions over what had happened to the records held in Foster’s office. At the root of all these controversies were questions about the Clintons’ character and intentions.

No two issues highlighted these doubts more than the debate over health care and the Clintons’ avowals of innocence on Whitewater. From the beginning of the 1992 presidential race, health care for all Americans had ranked as the primary reform sought by Democrats, second only to economic growth as a domestic priority. A striking majority of Americans said they favored such reform. The only more important issue was whether the president and the First Lady could be believed when they claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing in their real estate dealings in Arkansas. In the end, both issues became part of the same underlying story—the internal dynamics of the relationship between Bill and Hillary.

* * *

Throughout the 1992 election campaign, the Democratic candidates had vied to be seen as the most enthusiastic about seeking health care reform. That in itself represented a minor miracle. Five presidents had put forward the need for universal health care since the turn of the century, only to encounter stiff opposition and give up the fight. FDR almost included it as part of Social Security. Then Harry Truman proposed it in 1947. But the issue became toxic given the degree to which the politics of anticommunism pervaded both foreign and domestic policy debates. National health insurance, Republicans insisted, meant “socialized medicine,” and anyone who supported it was “soft on communism,” a “fellow traveler.” Now the Cold War was over. Harris Wofford, to everyone’s surprise, had been elected to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania largely by campaigning for health care. As a result, virtually every Democratic candidate embraced some form of health care reform, with Clinton saying he favored universal coverage for every American citizen.

But almost immediately after the election, that priority fell victim to political squabbles among Clinton advisers, especially given the doubling of the annual deficit, announced a month before Clinton took office.

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