[NYTr] Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Sep 29, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09292007.html

Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Just like the architect of the Tower of Babel bustling out of his
studio with a fresh set of drawings, Hillary Clinton has produced a new
health plan. Politicians don't care to admit they messed up, and Mrs
Clinton is no exception to this rule. In fact she is entirely incapable
of conceding error. The most she would concede during the rollout
ceremonies earlier this month is that the last time she took on the
health industry, she was too ambitious. This is a most forgiving
posture towards one of the great political disasters of the 1990s.

In the dawn of the Clinton era, many Americans believed the new
president might actually do something to fix the mess optimistically
described as the health care system. Bill Clinton's pledge to do so was
a prime reason why he got elected. In the first hours of his
presidency, he announced he was handing the big assignment to his wife.
The political conditions were favorable. In early 1993, nearly 70 per
cent of all Americans wanted a system of national healthcare, a sound
base on which to build a national coalition powerful enough to cow the
insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies--two of the most powerful forces
on the American political scene.

Hilary Clinton is not a populist by temperament. She had been a
powerful corporate lawyer in Little Rock, accustomed to covert deals
behind closed doors. When health care reformers, Steffie Woolhandler
and David Himmelstein urged Mrs Clinton in early 1993 to use that small
window of opportunity to take on the insurance industry and bring in a
Canadian-style system and that the majority of all Americans would
support her, she answered contemptuously to Himmelstein, "tell me
something interesting". As she embarked on her mission, all the early
headlines concerned her obsession with secrecy.

By the time Mrs Clinton's 1342-page Bill landed in Congress later in
1993, she had managed to offend the very Democratic leadership
essential to making health reform a reality. The proposal itself, under
the mystic mantra 'Managed Competition', embodied all the distinctive
tropes of neo-liberalism: a naive complicity with the darker corporate
ftorces, accompanied by an adamant refusal to even consider building
the popular political coalition that alone could have faced and routed
the opposition.

Fourteen years after that debacle, health care in America has got
steadily worse. Critics trumpet endlessly the bleak statistic that
nearly 50 million people are without any form of health insurance at
all, though it is not clear whether this is quite the disaster it is
cracked up to be, given the lethal nature of huge portions of the
"health" system. Go to a doctor flourishing your Blue Cross card and
three months later the insurance company notifies you that deductibles
and other conditions laid out on the policy in 2-point type mean that
the company is ponying up only 5 per cent of the bill. Get in a car
crash--a prime reason to have health insurance--and the surgeon
debating whether to sew you together again checks on the amount of
coverage on your policy and if it's below $2 million may let you die in
the waiting room. It nearly happened to a friend of my neighbor, Joe
Paff, though in that instance the hospital found Joe's pal was covered
up to $3 million and so the operation went forward.

Costs are now so high that the middle class is being priced out of the
game. It's cheaper to head for Panama or Costa Rica or even India and
pay cash on the barrel. Many Russians now naturalized as Americans
simply head back to the former Soviet Union for any serious surgical or
dental procedure. Even taking a $2,000 Aeroflot ticket into account, it
works out far cheaper.

Those with no sanctuary in another country head for Chinese herbalists,
dose themselves with homeopathic nostrums or smoke marijuana to keep
the pain at bay.

Reformers flourish the Canadian system as the model; Michael Moore's
recent film Sicko dwelled on its allurements. But Canada has a social
democratic tradition. America has none. The sole surviving relic of the
New Deal era is Social Security, and that is under constant assault.

So 'health reform' in the present age means, at best, a slight cosmetic
adjustment, and so it is with Mrs Clinton's new plan, modelled on a
scheme adopted in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, whereby everybody
is legally compelled to have some type of health insurance.

As Drs Woolhandler and Himmelstein recently described it on this site
the Massachusetts plan spells out as compulsory ruin. A couple in their
fifties face a minimum annual premium of $8,638. Their policy has no
coverage for prescription medicines, and there's a $2,000 deductible
per person before the insurance even kicks in. In other words, they're
destroyed by the insurance costs, before they are plunged into
bankruptcy with the arrival of any serious illness.

So, for all these reasons, no one--probably not even its author--takes
Mrs Clinton's plan very seriously. They all know that in this decade,
far more than in the early 1990s, the darker forces are firmly in
control. In the health area, as Rick Hertzberg points out in an
interesting piece in the current Yorker, every Democratic presidential
candidate since Truman has pledged to reform the heath system, and
every Democratic president has swiftly collapsed in the face of the
lobbies opposing reform. Whoever is president in 2009, there's not a
chance in a million that there will be any substantive rearrangement of
the furniture.

The Clintons have always excited passions disproportionate to their
very modest talents as creative politicians. Looking back across the
Nineties at the frenzied Republican onslaughts on the couple, one can
only wag one's head in bemusement at the Right's hysteria. Why did they
consume so much energy in savaging a pair who had learned conclusively
from their earlier upsets in Arkansas that you don't get ahead by
offending the powerful, starting with the timber and chicken barons who
controlled that backward and impoverished state?

To be fair on Bill and Hillary, beyond some ritual freshets of campaign
rhetoric in primary season they have never advertised themselves as
anything other than reliable guardians of the basic Business Round
Table agenda that defines the programmatic vision of 99.9 per cent of
all American politicians.

The function of the Democratic Party is to sell stuff to the populace
the Republicans can't get away with on their own, like throwing single
mothers and children off the welfare rolls or exporting America's blue
collar jobs to Mexico and China. Briskly enough, Bill Clinton handed
economic policy over to the Wall Street traders, led by his Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin. The Clinton years saw a bubble boom, pushed
along by consumer-spending by the rich. The ratio of wages for the
average worker to the pay of the average CEO went from 113 to 1 in
l991, just before Clinton stepped into the White House, to 449 to 1
when he quit. The overall bargaining position of labor got worse, as
did the situation of the very poor. Two thirds of Clinton's famed
fiscal turnaround stemmed from cuts in government spending relative to
GDP (54 per cent), something well beyond Republican competence.

But since right-wing talk radio and the editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal depend on the daily evocation and execration of demons,
the Clintons were never given a pat on the back for their seven years
of Republican governance, following the opening year of chastisement
and collapsed expectations. Instead they were methodically haunted with
charges wild enough to make a Borgia blink, enhanced with intricate
flow charts of the serial assassination of their enemies. (Touchingly,
American conspiracy-mongers credit their presidents with fiendish
efficiency, of which Bush and Cheney's supposed "inside job" downing of
the World Trade Center Towers is the most recent example.)

Recently I endured the penance of reading the second volume of Nigel
Hamilton's biography, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency. The plot
line is simple: Clinton arrives in office in 1993 and makes a mess of
things, in considerable measure because of Hillary's arrogant
insistence on being co-president. Then Bill turns things around, faces
down Newt Gingrich and concludes his first term with the defeat of Bob
Dole.

Although the narrative arc is childish in intellectual and imaginative
contour it takes Hamilton 766 pages to get through four years. Nothing
here will startle anyone who read a newspaper or weekly magazine in the
period in question, let alone Bob Woodward's The Agenda, or memoirs by
the principals and secondary players--all of which are dutifully cited
as prime sources in Hamilton's footnotes. Judging by the importance he
attaches to the man's efforts, and the frequency with which he cites
him, Hamilton's most productive interview was with Leon Panetta, a
California congressman who ended up as chief of staff, trying to bring
order to the Clintons' chaotic White House.

>From Hamilton's acknowledgements we learn that he submitted an even
vaster manuscript which the publisher rejected. What we have here is a
reduction, as they say onmenus these days, drizzled with subheads to
keep the reader on track. The nine-page chapter on Paula Jones, the
woman whose charges of harassment led to Clinton's impeachment, has six
subheads, shoved in by either Hamilton or, more likely a weary editor
whose creative energies had long since grown sluggish: "Wanting An
Apology", "Blood in the Water", "Sound Advice", "Paula Jones
Uncovered". The prose is banal, faithfully reflecting the author's
unerringly conventional political outlook.

No one has yet written particularly well about the Clintons, probably
because the appropriate tone--Mencken's comic savagery--was devalued by
Bill's assailants on the right. Obsessed by Bush, the liberals cannot
see Clinton for the light-weight scoundrel he was and have reinvented
his terms in the White House as a golden age, whose possible sequel
under the aegis of President Hillary Clinton they eagerly await.

Solemnly plowing his way through the Lewinsky scandal Hamilton misses a
striking vignette of his hero, unearthed by special prosecutor Ken
Starr and laid out in that hilarious document, The Starr Report, surely
one of the weirdest literary enterprises in American political history.
Starr solemnly recounts a White House tryst between Bill Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky in 1996, when Bill, receiving satisfaction from Monica
in his nether regions, gave satisfaction over the phone to Alfonso
Fanjul, the Florida sugar baron who was complaining that Al Gore had
just proposed a sugar tax and had vowed to clean up the Everglades.

Political biography is too pompous a literary form these days to
accommodate such material with the necessary lightness of touch. But
then, America has always taken its presidents far too seriously.