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Baucus Buys Time
Did the Baucus bill sell out progressives, move the ball forward, or both?
Sep 18, 2009
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After all those months of buildup, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Sen. Max Baucus, produced a health-care reform bill that coddles the insurance industry to such an extent that it could have been written in a corporate boardroom. Indeed, you might say that it actually was, because it incorporates recommendations offered by two former Senate leaders, Republican Bob Dole and Democrat Tom Daschle, both now affiliated with Alston + Bird, a prominent law and lobbying firm that includes among its clients major health-insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital clients.
The best thing you can say about the Baucus bill is that it provides a basis for the process to continue. Baucus didn't get a single Republican to stand with him at the lectern when he put down his chairman's mark, to use the lingo of the Senate. Now it's up to Democrats and Republicans on the committee to offer amendments to tweak the bill, another step on the long journey to produce legislation that President Obama can sign by the end of the year.
Flanked by Alston + Bird health-care specialists, many of them former top congressional aides, Dole and Daschle took questions Wednesday morning from a small group of reporters about the Baucus plan and the prospects for health-care reform. It's fair to say that Dole, who is now 86 and newly in demand as a voice of reason for the Republicans, stole the show with his caustic one-liners and wry commentary. He's been urging Republicans to stay in the game on health-care reform and keep talking, even though they've been unwilling so far to give Obama even a single vote. "When something affects 95 percent of the people, you just can't take a walk," Dole said, explaining that he's not trying to sell Republicans on any plan, but to just keep them at the table, a task that he undertook at the behest of Baucus.
It's an unaccustomed role for Dole, who's not normally thought of as a peacemaker. He forged his national persona as a hatchet man running as Gerald Ford's vice president in 1976. Before stepping down as Senate majority leader in 1996 to run for president, Dole reveled in his image as a master obstructionist of legislation advanced by President Clinton and the Democrats. But politics has gotten so much more angry and polarized since then that Dole seems almost cuddly compared with today's GOP avatars. He said a bill can't be considered truly bipartisan unless a dozen Republicans sign on. At the same time, he recognized that Republicans are irrelevant, that Democrats have the votes to go ahead without them. "A bill will pass if it's a recipe for devil's food cake," he said. "They'll call it health-care reform, and there'll be a signing ceremony."
With Daschle in the role of Ed McMahon to Dole's Johnny Carson, the hourlong session turned into a tutorial on politics. Dole said it's too early to say Republicans won't come aboard. "A lot of this is strategy. Do you make a play now? Or do you wait until you're in the middle of it?" He recalled how President Reagan would meet with members, tell a joke or two, and turn votes with the force of his personality. The question Obama should ask each lawmaker whose vote he needs: what would it take to bring you on? "This is a business," said Dole. "Instead of going to Ohio [where Obama campaigned for health-care reform on Wednesday], maybe he ought to go up to the Senate."
Few understand the business of politics better than Dole. If he's right, that this is a game of strategy, there will be a lot more cards played before we know with certainty whether Baucus sold out, or did the best he could as chairman of a committee dominated by small-state and rural interests. The Baucus bill still has the best chance of emerging as the leading contender among the five bills before Congress. That won't make progressives happy, but around Washington, in boardrooms like the one at Alston + Bird—where Baucus actively reached out for help in crafting a deal—satisfaction reigns.
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