If you remember the Democratic presidential primary last time around, you'll probably recall that there wasn't much breathing room between the candidates on most policy issues. Honestly, looking back it was the mostly wonkishly absurd thing you can imagine. Bill Richardson trying to distinguish himself by setting the cap on his cap-and-trade carbon proposal a little bit higher than anyone else's. John Edwards arguing with Obama over tactics of all things: should we choose an aggressive or conciliatory approach when beginning health reform negotiations? Hillary getting booed for making the point to a liberal-leaning audience that lobbyists do have a role to play in the legislative process (a fact Obama, it seems, has come to appreciate).
Once the field had been whittled down to the Final Two the major policy difference concerned the question of mandates: does the health reform plan need to include an individual mandate that forces people to obtain health insurance? Hillary Clinton included an individual mandate in her health care plan, Barack Obama did not. In fact, he frequently made the mandate an object of scorn and repeatedly used it to club Clinton over the head. Here's part of an Obama ad during the primaries:
SCRIPT: Announcer: "Hillary Clinton's attacking, but what's she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don't. Barack Obama believes that it's not that people don't want health care, it's that they can't afford it. That's why the Obama plan reduces costs more than Hillary's, saving $2,500 for the typical family. For health care we can afford, vote for change we can believe in."
Let's pop into the Bill Clinton interview (the bit I'm talking about starts around 4:30 minutes in):
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive - Bill Clinton Extended Interview Pt. 2 | ||||
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Jon Stewart: Is it hard not to give a little poke, give a little thing--because Obama now he says, well, in health insurance maybe there should be an individual mandate. That was something Hilary had said during the campaign, he had come out against that, now he's saying it's a good thing. You sit at lunch and lean over and go like "yeah, that individual mandate, looking good now isn't it?"
Bill Clinton: You know, I don't. I ran in too many elections to know that you get in these elections and you have to highlight the differences and minimize the commonality otherwise how will people make a choice? And what you have to do when you're running so that you can feel good about yourself is to at least believe in the differences. But then after an election there are always circumstances, particularly if you become President, where circumstances take over and then the job becomes a constant contest between doing what you pledged to do when you ran--without which you will feel like you let the American people and especially the people that voted for you down--and responding to incoming fire...
It sounds to me like he's combining two different things here. After that last sentence he went into the example of how 9/11 affected the Bush agenda and forced the President to react to unforeseen circumstances. And certainly that's true, the President (and any elected official) always has to be flexible enough to roll with the punches.
But that's not the same as choosing to believe something during a campaign because it's politically convenient, which is how I read that bolded part. Obama is not a dumb man and I doubt he had some Eureka! moment upon becoming President that convinced him that mandates are better policy. It doesn't seem plausible to me that he knew significantly less about health care policy last year than he does now. So perhaps Bill is correct: in order to win votes, Obama chose to believe in a policy idea that his rational side would ultimately reject, a transition that PolitiFact labeled a full flop (the highest degree of flip flop they bestow ).
In the picture Bill Clinton presents, Obama was not being deliberately disingenuous. Not exactly, anyway. Instead of simply knowing he was trashing a policy that he would ultimately have to embrace, he somehow made himself genuinely believe that a plan without a mandate would be superior--so he could still feel good about himself, as Bill put it. And this is a part of what I was getting at when I posted about political absurdism--in practice, the only political or policy truths that exist are the ones we choose to will into existence. Rationality often takes a backseat to apparently deep-seated (but perhaps newly fabricated) beliefs that may turn out to be extremely capricious.
When his goal was to win a primary, it was politically important for Obama to believe mandates were unnecessary or even destructive. Now that his goal is to create a reform plan that doesn't collapse in on itself when implemented, it's likely necessary for him to believe in the importance of the mandate. Of course, it may never have risen to the level of actual belief, Obama may have just been playing dumb (with others but perhaps also to some extent with himself) but still partially engaging in the sort of doublethink that makes human beings so maddeningly complex. Avoiding blatant dishonesty in the face of the demands the political system makes on a person occasionally requires a compartmentalization of what one knows and what one believes. Which one--political knowledge or belief--is more malleable I'm not quite sure.
In this case, the campaign was about believing, governing is about knowing. It's interesting to see Bill Clinton sort of almost make that point.
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