Megan McArdle is a dunce. Imagine, if you will, that Hillary Clinton had become president in 2009 instead of Barack Obama. Now imagine that she tried to implement the health care plan she ran on. She would have been dependent on the exact same Congress with the exact same committee chairs who had the exact same ideas about what should and shouldn’t be in the bill. Now, imagine that her chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had recommended that she drop the effort to pass the bill because it was too politically fraught. Would Hillary have countenanced losing on health care for a second time when she still had a path to victory?
Did anything she did on the campaign trail in 2008 indicate that she’s the kind of woman who folds her tent and gives up when the odds look stacked against her?
There is no question in my mind that Hillary Clinton would done exactly what President Obama did because she would have seen failure on health care as unthinkable so long as it could be avoided.
Their presidencies would have been much different from each other in many respects, but not on this one.
How would she deal with spineless Senators’ unwillingness to do anything about the filibuster?
[BLOCKQUOTE]Would Hillary have countenanced losing on health care for a second time when she still had a path to victory?[/BLOCKQUOTE]
Hillary would have held her finger to the wind and then acted accordingly.
I agree. McArdle is worse than a dunce. She’s a fucking idiot. But not because Hillary wouldn’t have folded but, rather, because she would have and she would have receiving NOTHING in return. The Tea Party (or something exactly like it) would have come into existence just the same. But we wouldn’t have the ACA. We’d have the same health care system we had before, which had degenerated long ago into a racket.
Instead we have a highly compromised system but a beginning of health care that’s actually workable. The road ahead is long. I hope that if Hillary gets elected she gets the kind of majorities that allow us to take the next step, and then I hope she has the balls to actually go for it.
I agree we would have gotten the ACA through but I’d give Pelosi the credit under Clinton same as I do now under Obama.
IIRC it was Pelosi’s spine that carried the day and convinced the president to go forward on the ACA.
Stopping there could have saved a bunch of precious bandwidth on the internet.
Even the right-wing is beginning to shill for Ms. Inevitable. No doubt it’s their plan to further screw up the Democratic Party.
She’s clearly reading from the America Rising playbook.
The right sees gold in driving a wedge between Obama and Clinton. In reality there’s almost no daylight there at all.
Except HRC is a lot more hawkish. Also, too, why does she need to read the America Rising playbook? She has long been a willing part of the Kochoctopus. See this:
http://shameproject.com/report/megan-mcardle-portrait-libertarian-taxpayersubsidized-brat/
have gotten health care done. Nothing in her career suggests that she has the political skill or leadership ability to pull off passing the ACA. In the Senate, she got nothing done for 8 years. And her one attempt in her entire career of leading on a huge policy issue was health care reform in the 1990s and she failed miserably. Democrats behind the scenes said that Hillary’s poor leadership and political skills played a huge role in that failure.
Compare that to Obama. In the IL Senate, he got a deal on videotaping interrogations that everyone in the state thought was impossible. In the Senate, he got 3 big bills through the Senate in his short tenure there.
I am getting more than a little sick of people acting like getting ACA passed was a big nothing that any Dem president could have accomplished. From all accounts, Obama was the one driving hard to get this done after Brown’s election when others wanted to give up.
The idea that Hillary is as competent or better than Obama as a politician or as a leader has absolutely no basis in reality. Compare their histories and you’ll see that Obama has a history of leading and succeeding on hard issues and Hillary doesn’t. No amount of whitewashing changes reality.
But you have to agree, her polling numbers are very high and there’s no reason to suspect that they’ll go down before the 2016 election.
the type of president she’ll be nor does it have anything to do with the idea that Hillary would have been just as effective or more effective as Obama as president from 2009-2016. That’s the nonsense I am pushing back on. There is nothing in her history to suggest that she’d be able to do the big things Obama got done – ACA, Stimulus, repeal of DADT, etc.
And just once I’d love a Hillary supporter to walk through her accomplishments and reasons why she’d make a good president without talking about polling #s. W polled well too. It didn’t make him a good president.
Why do you say that before the primary starts? There are some fierce competitors looking at 2016. Obama put down the blueprint for beating the establishment choice. Seeing the establishment propping up the Clintons like this tells me they’re weak and out of ideas. It’s on the candidate to make it happen. The glory days of 1993-2000 are ancient history. Let’s see them deal with 2016’s landscape. I still remember Good ol’ boy saying something about how the young Senator would be getting our coffee back in the day. Can we be sure they’ve flushed that bullshit out of their system?
He’s being snarky. See, Machina, Davis X
I have to disagree with you here Booman. There was a moment during the battle for the ACA when things were looking pretty bleak. The idea of dropping comprehensive reform and trying to pass a more limited bill was run up the flagpole. I think it was credited to Rahm. Obama pretty quickly put the kabosh on that. He kept the Democrats unified and it worked. That’s the moment when I think Hilary would have blinked. Of course, it’s all speculation, but based on her and Bill’s political history, I think she would have tried to go for the limited reform to try and claim some kind of victory. Of course it wouldn’t have worked. Republicans would have smelled the blood in the water and doubled down and weak-kneed Democrats would have started folding in droves.
Hillary may be the best possibility for 2016 and I buy your argument about her coattails making more progressive legislation possible. But I am fairly certain that if she had won in 2008, the ACA would never have seen the light of day.
“This is about whether we’re going to get big things done. I wasn’t sent here to do school uniforms.”
This is what separates Obama from the Clintons. He wants to get big things done and he has. Obama’s list of accomplishments dwarfs Clinton’s and Obama still has 1 1/2 more years to go.
Well, but you’re not really engaging Ms. McArdle on the counterfactual ground that she’s staked out. For her argument to make sense, you need more than a President Hillary Clinton. You also have to grant that the Affordable Care Act was as calamitous a mistake for the country as the Iraq invasion. Then everything falls into place, and it’s easy to see how this whole business with Obama’s birth certificate never would have happened if he hadn’t tried to reform the healthcare system.
In other words, you have to be prepared to admit that the Tea Party is basically right about everything. But no, you insist on dragging the discussion back into factual territory. This gives you an unfair advantage.
“Is Megan McArdle a dunce?” should become a standard “duh!” question along the lines of “Is the Pope Catholic?” and “Does a bear pee in the woods?”.
Also, too. WalMartCare. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2014/08/welcome_to_walmart_the_doctor051574.php
While 2008 favored a Democratic win, should we ignore 1988 when a Democratic win was also favored? In the early going, Romney was performing better than the other candidates with strong second place in Iowa (Huckabee first) and NH (McCain first) and then MI that Romney won and McCain came in second. With Clinton sweeping the early Democratic primary elections, would that have changed the GOP primary outcomes? Regardless of whether McCain or Romney was the 2008 nominee, Sarah Palin wouldn’t have been the VP nominee.
Would a Clinton/Bayh ticket have excited as many young and minority voters as the Obama/Biden ticket did? Would a Romney/Hutchison ticket have been as easy to defeat as McCain/Palin? Thus, to imagine what Clinton would have done in the WH, one first has to imagine that she would have beat the GOP ticket, and given all her stumbles against the tougher Obama in the primaries, she could easily have come up short. So, we could waste some time imagining what nationalized Romneycare would have looked like.
This.
I highly doubt that had Clinton been at the front of a 2008 POTUS ticket that the makeup of the House and Senate would have been exactly the same.
Perhaps Clinton would have garnered even more House and Senate Dems…it’s possible. But it is folly to say that everything that happened since the election regarding the PPACA would have been exactly the same.
Sorry, what about 1988 favored a Democratic win?
There was this:
Then this:
May 1988 NYTimes
July 1988 NYTimes
Keep in mind that this was before the full impact of the S&L debacle was known to the public.
I think this is a first. All the commenters on this thread are in agreement, and so am I.