Health-care push brings Bill Clinton, Obama together, with political benefits ... - Washington Post

NEW YORK — In one of his first acts as President Obama’s new health-care adviser, Chris Jennings traveled to Harlem last month to pay a visit to his old boss, Bill Clinton.

Armed with a PowerPoint presentation detailing how the new health-care law will go into effect, Jennings made his pitch: Obama needs your help, both to persuade millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for coverage and to combat Republican attempts to undermine the law.

Clinton tried and failed to enact an expansion of health-care coverage as president. Now Obama, who signed the Affordable Care Act into law, is relying on Clinton to help make it a legacy.

Here in Manhattan on Tuesday, Clinton will welcome Obama on stage at his annual celebrity-sprinkled charitable gathering. The two presidents, in a conversation led by Clinton, will discuss the merits of the health-care law, which has come to be known as Obamacare. The event comes three weeks after Clinton gave a 50-minute speech in his home state of Arkansas explaining how the system works and arguing that it makes the country stronger.

For Obama and Clinton, whose relationship has been tense and sometimes hostile, selling health care gives them a chance to nurse old wounds while also helping each other politically. Whether this fall’s high-stakes rollout of Obamacare is successful could define both Obama’s legacy and the contours of the 2016 presidential contest, which Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is considering entering.

“Bill Clinton is to politics like a 12-year-old boy is to baseball: There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to be in the game,” said Don Fowler, a longtime Clinton friend and former Democratic National Committee chairman. “That sense of being permitted to play and being appreciated and having people pay attention to him — that’s his ultimate motivation. That’s what this circumstance gives him.”

Tensions from 2008 ease

Fowler remembers how unlikely a Clinton-Obama partnership seemed five years ago, when Obama started besting Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Fowler was at Bill Clinton’s side in South Carolina in 2008 as he inflamed racial tensions by attacking Obama on the stump.

But, Fowler said, “Obama won, and [Clinton] understands better than anybody that you shouldn’t let one unhappy experience dictate a whole life relationship.”

The tensions between Clinton and Obama slowly eased. In 2009, Obama named Hillary Clinton his secretary of state. And by 2012, Bill Clinton had become one of the president’s most important and effective campaign surrogates, delivering a speech at the Democratic National Convention that some Democrats believe secured Obama’s reelection.

Now, Clinton is back in the game with health care.

“This is an issue that is very personal for him,” said Skip Rutherford, a Clinton friend and dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. “Presidents have tried to make this issue work for decades, and I don’t think anyone tried any harder than Bill Clinton. He did everything he could to move this ball forward.”