A Woman in Charge (49 page)

The president seemed caught between his wife and his advisers. More often than not, he would mediate disputes between them by saying, “Let's revisit this.” In fact, a new dynamic in the Clinton partnership was developing: for the first time, he seemed inclined to placate Hillary, and make decisions he strongly believed were against his better instincts. That was a mistake.

 

S
OON AFTER
B
ILL
appointed her, Hillary had begun lobbying to have her plan included as part of the president's budget. Clinton was already proposing a relatively drastic budget that would increase taxes and make large cuts to government programs. His economic advisers and congressional liaison staff had predicted it was going to be a very hard sell without the added burden of incorporating health care.

Since progress on virtually all other administration bills would be delayed until Congress acted on the overall economic plan, Bill's political and economic advisers wanted to push a budget bill through Congress as quickly as possible. Health care would not only slow it down, it might also increase spending so significantly that it could erase the deficit reduction central to the president's plan to get the economy back on track.

Hillary realized that the budget bill was going to be so contentious that debate about it on Capitol Hill would suck air out of her health care initiative. Unless her plan was included in the budget bill, she feared it would be impossible to enact health care reform before the midterm elections. As a matter of tactics, she argued that health care belonged in the budget because of its impact on spending, taxes, and entitlement programs.

House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt had urged Hillary to incorporate her health plan in the budget proposal. The reality of gridlocked Washington was that any bill passed in the Senate required more than a simple fifty-one-vote majority. At least sixty votes were needed to counter the opposing party's inevitable attempt to stop passage with a filibuster—sixty votes cast to end debate and consider the legislation on its merits—and Gephardt had no doubt that Hillary's health care proposal on its own would head straight into a filibuster. Budget resolutions, however, required only a majority vote to be considered under Senate rules.

Persuaded of Gephardt's position, Hillary arranged a meeting with Bill and the House leader. The president found the case for adding health care to the budget a compelling one and told Hillary and Magaziner to approach Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. He was also supportive, telling Hillary that if the administration were to introduce a health care plan as a separate bill, it would decrease its chance of passage. As midterm elections neared, “the rules in the Senate are such that you dramatically enhance the leverage of the opposition,” he explained.

It was significant as well that not having a separate bill would take jurisdiction of the health care plan out of the realm of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Pat Moynihan, whose influence on both houses of Congress was enormous and who was skeptical of wholesale, ungraduated, health care reform. He had urged the Clintons to tackle the issue of welfare reform first.

The president, however, continued to be noncommittal about whether to include Hillary's proposal in his budget to Congress. Frustrated, Hillary believed she needed to win over Bill's advisers. She was in the odd position of needing their support in what she believed should be solvable in a marital discussion.

Hillary and Magaziner invited the whole economic team to a meeting in the EOB during the first week of February. The president's advisers pointed out that details of her reform plan could not be fully enough developed in time for the president's joint address to Congress on February 17, when he was scheduled to introduce his budget plan. Bentsen, Rubin, Shalala, and Tyson all reiterated their doubts about including health care in the president's budget, suggesting that it might keep the budget from passing. “George Mitchell and Dick Gephardt don't think it's [a] crazy [idea],” Hillary said.

One of the president's principal deputies, who was present for many of the meetings at which Hillary tried to persuade her husband's advisers, could see her frustration growing, “because the budget [uncertainty] was preventing him from preparing for health care.” This official concluded that Hillary's real interest in deficit reduction was virtually nonexistent. “The Rubins and Bentsens of the world were also the ones who were most skeptical about the health care plan. They saw it as big government—that it wouldn't be respected by the markets. She was feeling hemmed in—her attitude was, ‘The same people that are making us give up our dreams on the economy are trying to do it to health care too.' So you could sense her bristling. Rubin was careful. He certainly believed in universal coverage. But he had specific questions—doubts—about the way Ira and Hillary were doing it. The numbers. The mechanism. That it wasn't thought through enough.”

 

I
N A BRILLIANT STROKE,
the president had invited Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to sit next to Hillary in the gallery for his speech to Congress of February 17, thus demonstrating implicit support for his economic plan and Hillary's ambitions for health care. Though the chairmanship of the Fed was considered a nonpartisan position, and Greenspan had been appointed by George Bush, the president's request that he sit next to the first lady made it all but impossible for Greenspan to decline. Moreover, he was pleased with the direction in which Clinton was proceeding on the budget.

Though the budget Clinton described in his speech did not include funding for universal health care, Hillary received meaningful consolation in a few lines in which he reaffirmed his commitment to her plans. “All of our efforts to strengthen the economy will fail unless we also take this year—not next year, not five years from now, but this year—bold steps to reform our health care system,” the president said. “Reducing health care costs can liberate literally hundreds of billions of dollars for new investment and growth and jobs, reducing not only our deficit but expanding investment in America.” It was the biggest applause line of the night, and the television cameras were trained on Hillary, beaming, with Greenspan beside her, as Clinton had known they would be.

But the opponents of the health care reform envisioned by the Clintons now knew they had the means to effectively attack her plan, and perhaps sink it. The country's medical establishment, represented by the American Medical Association, had been successful since the Truman administration in killing all attempts at health care reform. On February 25, the equally establishment Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and new organizations formed specifically to fight Hillary's health care plan filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding that the secret deliberations of the health care task force be outlawed; that its meetings be ordered open to press and public; and that the names of the five hundred consulting experts be released. “That would be like opening the White House at every staff meeting we have,” the president said. It would be impossible to “get anything done.” Health care would be fully and fairly debated, he promised, and every interest group would be able to voice its opinions, once the bill made it to Congress.

Hillary fully understood what had happened. She charged that her opponents had used an “obscure law” to undermine the orderly process of developing her plan. It had been a deft political ploy to create an exaggerated impression of secrecy.

She told Vince Foster to fix it.

 

T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
Hillary and Foster, said Webb Hubbell, “was no longer co-equals. He was working for her. Originally she had worked for him [at the Rose Law Firm]. At first he was thrilled to be working at the White House. But the relationship was shifting…. As opposed to, Let's talk this out, it was, Let's get this fixed.”

In effect, Hillary burdened Foster with much of the weight of her hopes for health care. The high stakes of the lawsuit were clear. If they lost in court, she feared something akin to Humpty Dumpty's fate—Hillary was not sure her health care initiative could ever be put back together again.

“I think the beginning of Vince's downturn was when the health care task force was sued,” said Hubbell, whom Foster immediately enlisted to help him. Vince said he would need all the available resources of the Justice Department. Every relevant related case needed to be researched, as well as the legislative intent of Congress in regard to government boards. Was there a way to get an immediate dismissal of the suit on jurisdictional grounds? Did the plaintiffs have standing? And speed was essential.

Within several days, more than one hundred Justice Department lawyers were working under their supervision on health care matters, several from every department. Then 150 were working. Hillary was constantly on the phone asking questions, following up.

“Instead of a team working together toward a glorious goal, [Vince and Hillary] were suddenly attorney and client,” said Hubbell. “His legal advice was now front-page news. And with the pressure Hillary was under to get a health care bill passed in the administration's One Hundred Days, she became a very demanding client indeed.”

Vince's office was only a few feet from Hillary's, across a reception area in the West Wing. Hubbell was seven blocks away at the Justice Department. Vince told him, “Webb, I told Hillary you're in charge of this at Justice. And that you and I are talking, and talking constantly. This is the most important thing we can do—make sure that we get this thing through, win this litigation.” Hubbell had always known Foster to be cool, methodical, imperturbable. Not now. Reporters were constantly calling him. “‘Fix it, Vince!' he said she had hissed. It hurt him deeply. The stress was getting to us all…. She was the boss. And when she says, ‘Win the litigation,' you're feeling pressure from the boss. Not only the boss, but a very good friend, who's under a lot of stress, and taking a lot of heat for this…. He was feeling the pressure, and it was a different relationship.”

The efforts of Foster, Nussbaum, Hubbell, and an army of Justice Department lawyers came to virtually naught. On March 10, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, ruled that Hillary should be treated like an “outsider” working for the White House, and thus the health care task force would have to meet in public when gathering facts.

Technically, the decision was not a total loss: the judge ruled that staff-level working groups could still meet behind closed doors and that the task force could meet privately when creating policy proposals for the president or giving him advice. Practically, the White House would merely have to comply with legal requirements for crafting a task force charter and publish meeting notices in the
Federal Register.
But it would have to list its consultants, whom reporters would immediately seek out.

Perception was the most important consideration of all, and it was clear that the judge had delivered a stinging rebuke to the first lady and the president. He had armed the Clintons' opponents with exactly the weapon they needed: opprobrium.

Hillary had put enormous pressure on Foster and he had failed.

N
EARLY A MONTH AFTER
Bill's speech to the joint session of Congress, he still had not made a decision about whether to include health care in the budget. But he was feeling Hillary's unrelenting pressure.

On March 11, he placed a phone call to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the senior Democrat in the Senate, whose support was essential to the legislative success of health care reform. The senator was famously known for his “Byrd rule,” prohibiting the introduction of “extraneous” matters into the supposedly pure budget process: incorporation of health care in the budget would put its consideration on a fast track and exempt it from much of the scrutiny required of other bills, and keep it insulated from threats of filibuster. Majority Leader Mitchell, Senator Jay Rockefeller (also of West Virginia), and the president all pushed the chairman to forgo his rule and allow the incorporation of Hillary's health care plan in the budget. Byrd refused.

Thereafter, Gephardt and Mitchell, the senior leaders of the president's party in Congress, warned Hillary that it would be impossible to pass both the budget and health care legislation before the 1994 congressional elections. The Clintons would pay a great price for ignoring the two leaders and not delaying. Later, Bill recognized his mistake in not taking a longer view.

Hillary now hurried to meet with congressmen and senators to agree on a bill they could give Congress to vote on. Only later, with the benefit of her Senate experience, did she realize that to ignore Byrd's opposition was a grave error. Her desperation to present a good health plan to the American people, to keep her promise, in her eyes, had forced her to act imprudently. Later, while a member of the Senate herself, she came to appreciate Byrd's position.