Why Empty Rhetoric Matters

I'm going to have to disagree with Atrios about the desirability of presidential candidates committing to something reasonably specific on health care. The need for specifics comes in not during the politics of the election campaign, but the politics of the legislative process. One of the reasons the Clinton health care initiative was derailable was that Clinton campaigned and won and a promise to devise a plan for universal health care, not on a particular plan (there were other problems, obviously, and the task was intrinsically difficult, etc., but this was one of the flaws of his legislative strategy). The best way to get something done, would be to propose something, be viciously attacked for it throughout a presidential campaign, then emerge victorious and demand action after inauguration.

That said, where I do agree with Atrios is that it's very early yet in this process. I have no particular desire to see the contenders roll out platforms and agendas at this point. It's in everyone's interest for everyone to stay vague and for everything to stay low-key for quite some time now. There's no particular point in outlining a governing agenda for 2009-10 in early 2007.

1/25/07 5:19PM del.icio.us this incoming links

Comments

The point about Clinton's failure is well-taken, but the bigger mistake is thinking that we're electing a Head Legislator instead of a President. Even without a Democratic President, we can enact health-care reform with the right kind of legislative campaign. Doubtless having a Democratic President would help, but the campaign is primarily legislative, and it won't end soon -- it's going to be a campaign, not a battle.

Democrats held Congress for so longer that we repeatedly make the mistake that what matters in picking a President is the sort of things that make a good Senator. John Kerry should have helped open some eyes as to why this isn't so. The last thing we need is having Barack Obama sound more like a legislator over the next two years.

The most important thing that the President does is not sign legislation. It's appointing the people who run the Executive Branch, and appointing judges.

Hell, I need to stop typing and turn this into a blog post.

Posted by: Tyrone Slothrop on January 25, 2007 06:02 PM

Let us not confuse specifics with "specifics"(TM). It's important for political candidates and even politicians when speaking to news outlets or on gab-fests to give tons of "specifics"(TM). It's also very important they reveal no actual specifics that could be used against them or to which some would hold them as promises or what not.

Part of the problem we Dems. tend to have in our wonkiness is that when called to produce "specifics"(TM) we produce actual specifics or decline to go into details, knowing that it would be a bad idea to produce specifics. The GOP has done a good job of sounding like they are giving quasi-specific plans when they in fact are saying nothing. We Dems. need to learn the difference between "specifics"(TM) and specifics and know when called upon to give "specifics" the former is meant and not the latter -- and we should thus have something to say other than "it's too soon to get into specifics" or actually getting into them.

Posted by: DAS on January 25, 2007 06:38 PM

I think proposing a specific health care plan is a horrible idea, because it's an issue that's just too complex and too easily demagouged. The president's (or the presidential candidate's) role should be to help build a consensus in favor of universal coverage, and lay out some general principles of how this could be done. The details should be worked out with the legislature.

If Clinton had run on the plan he ended up proposing, he probably wouldn't even have been elected. His big mistake wasn't that he didn't run on a specific plan; it was that once in office he and Hillary developed the plan without any input or buy-in from the Congress. Doing it that way is a recipe for failure.

Posted by: RC on January 25, 2007 07:23 PM

For me the problem with Obama isn't the lack of specifics, it's the way he sounds so sanctimonious while he's being so vague. Especially his favorite line about the "smallness of our politics," which he trotted out again in this speech.

What the hell does that mean? We've all been waiting for him to endorse electronic record keeping, to instantly save us a quarter of our health care costs and fix the whole insurance problem?

If a politician places himself above the his grubby little colleagues, actually making a proposal becomes the least he could do to justify his self appointed high station.

Posted by: AJ on January 25, 2007 08:00 PM

DAS has really nailed it. Watch the Rs- they hammer away on "principles" but remain so vague on the practice that they can enact just about anything and their "base" will swallow it.

We don't have a politburo on the left to tell us what to say, but individually we can keep it short and sweet- we can do better with universal coverage, and save money in the process, without compromising a person's ability to see the doctor of their choice.

As for the Clinton plan, as soon as it was announced it was obvious that a) it was not universal coverage, and b) it wouldn't improve the lives of poor people who couldn't afford healthcare. I remember this quite vividly because then, as now, I was a poor person who couldn't afford healthcare.

Offering specifics is just like holding red meat in front of the Tyler Cowens of the world.

Posted by: serial catowner on January 25, 2007 08:03 PM

The main thing right now is for Obama to tell people what he thinks is critical and what is secondary. The principled way to do that would have been:

"Thank you very much. I'm very grateful for Families USA giving me this opportunity to share my views on health care with you.

"For me the only thing that really matters is getting to universal coverage. After we've done that we can, over time, work on other improvements.

"Thank you for your attention."

However, he was invited to give a speech, and the constraints of the genre don't permit this, so there's lots of boring non-bold stuff. Somehow, though, what the news services are reporting him as having said is pretty close to the above. This seems fairly deft on his part, and may not be unrelated to the speech having exactly one newsworthy aspect.

Posted by: Andy McLennan on January 25, 2007 08:03 PM

I think RC has this right; had Clinton proposed his plan early, the NFIB and NAII would have spent a billion dollars to derail his candidacy. The real error was developing the whole thing with insufficient input from Congress.

Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?' — Moynihan

Obviously that doesn't get you 60 votes, but it was a big part of the reason.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot on January 25, 2007 08:31 PM

Re: As for the Clinton plan, as soon as it was announced it was obvious that a) it was not universal coverage, and b) it wouldn't improve the lives of poor people who couldn't afford healthcare.

I don't remember it that way at all. In the 1993 Clinton plan everyone would indeed be covered (universal coverage was promised within three years of its enactment, 1997 being the original target date), but through a complex mechanism involving large healthcare purchasing cooperatives replacing employer paid insurance with private companies (the insurance companies were invited to merge and morph into the cooperatives). The plan was actually modeled on Germany's healthcare system, which does indeed have universal coverage.

Posted by: Jonf on January 25, 2007 09:37 PM

While I can appreciate the desire for more specifics on a plan, I'm going to have to go with RC on this one -- to try and get all policy wonky in a relatively short speech on an issue so mind-blowingly complex is just unrealistic.

Get the idea out there and gather support for the notion (not with the public -- I think it has that -- but with the policy makers and groups most intimately involved), thus setting the stage for the specifics later.

I will say, however, that one of the knocks on Obama is that he's often too vague and too ... flowery in his language (for lack of a better term). This certainly didn't help.

But the more I find out about the guy, the more I like, so maybe I'm just willing to cut him more slack and get over that fact.

Posted by: Uhholy Moses on January 25, 2007 10:40 PM

To what degree did Bush's attempt to gut social security fail because he hadn't campaigned on the issue versus he hadn't campaigned on specifics?

Posted by: MDtoMN on January 26, 2007 08:07 AM

Frankly, I'm tired of hearing about how complex the issue is. It's not. Medicare for everyone. Medicare is an enormously popular program among the elderly. Hospitals and doctors already know the paperwork. Employers know how to implement the payroll taxes. It has a 1% administrative over head and currently covers the least helathy demographic of Americans. It is a success story and should be an easy pitch to make.

Posted by: DanF on January 26, 2007 10:40 AM

I see two sources of complexity:

a) how to make the transition

b) how to ration the healthcare --- at some point mean HMOs were doing that, but rather briefly, as they got whacked politically,

Re b): outside the fields of medicine and military, newer and better is frequently less expensive as well. Some wise policy keeping medical inflation in check is possible --- or more precisely, conceivable.

However, the transition costs could be funded by savings on overhead, so it would be wise to separate the two issues.

That said, my recommended program for the duration of campaign would be rather vague, and purely based on slogans.

"Let us think about American families. Some propose to secure the medical care for the olders of us, and some advocate it for the poorest of us and for the youngest. But what about the normal American families?" I can drone for five minutes like that, it can sound pretty well, and it can hint quite a number of specifics.

True specified specific are first of all boring. Secondly, mercenary think tanks would quickly start convincing the public that the goal of the plan is to rip wee babies from the bosoms of their mothers and create waiting lists that would meander from Rio Grande all the way to Canada.

Posted by: piotr on January 27, 2007 09:46 PM

To what degree did Bush's attempt to gut social security fail because he hadn't campaigned on the issue versus he hadn't campaigned on specifics?

Posted by: 單身派對 on October 3, 2007 12:10 AM

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