Obama's bent on healthcare reform and the timing seems perfect--Democrats are in power and businesses are on board because their healthcare costs are up.
This story in NYT's magazine tells how Obama's going to get healthcare reform done--by bringing the executive and legislative branches of government together.
After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history. Obama’s White House is run by Rahm Emanuel, a former House leader who was generally considered to be on a fast track to the speakership before he resigned to become chief of staff, and it is teeming with aides plucked from the senior ranks of both chambers. Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.Joe Biden has a key role:
And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”
Part of Biden’s White House portfolio is to act as unofficial ambassador to the Senate, carrying information back and forth between his old colleagues and his new boss. During the recent debate over the budget, he walked onto the Senate floor and plopped himself down, uninvited, next to Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who as chairman of the powerful Finance Committee will be a central figure in the coming health care debates. Biden asked Baucus what he needed from the White House in order to get a health care bill through his committee, according to both men, and then the talkative Biden spent the better part of a half-hour simply listening quietly, promising as he left the chamber (“I give my word as a Biden,” he likes to say) to faithfully relay Baucus’s thoughts to the president. It was the kind of exchange that rarely took place in 1993, and it is a large part of why Obama’s team is optimistic about succeeding where Clinton failed.Rahm is also key:
OBAMA’S AGGRESSIVE COURTSHIP of Congress is plotted and directed by Emanuel, who despite his legendary personality flaws — his penchant for profane mockery is now so well documented that you sometimes have the sense he’s cursing at you so as not to disappoint — is freakishly well suited to the job. Emanuel served as a senior aide in Clinton’s White House before running for Congress and then overseeing the Democrats’ successful drive to take back the House, which means he is that rare politician who feels equally at home on both ends of the avenue. “Rahm is family to all of us,” Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, told me recently.Read the whole story here.
