Bill Clinton will attempt again next week to do for Obamacare what has long eluded its namesake: Cut through the political noise and change the perception of a law much of the public doesn’t like or understand.
His speech at Clinton’s presidential library in Arkansas Wednesday is a continuation of the relationship that benefited the former and current president in the 2012 campaign. It’s a role Clinton has played before on behalf of the Affordable Care Act, which is rooted in the failed effort by he and his wife, Hillary Clinton, to pass comprehensive health care reform two decades ago.
Clinton is giving the speech at the request of the White House, but the choice of venue was his, and one that seemed natural to him, according to his aides.
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“For a variety of reasons, including having hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads run against the law, the administration has had a hard time communicating the law’s benefits and knocking down the false attacks,” said Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter, who was deeply involved in the health reform effort when she was an adviser to President Barack Obama.
“There’s no one better to lay it all out for the American people than President Clinton,” she added. “He’ll cut through the rhetoric and get to the heart of the issue … ‘How does the law impact me and my family, and how much will my health care cost?’ Ultimately, that’s all the American people care about, and President Clinton knows how to put it in their terms.”
The aim of the speech may be broader than a continuation of Clinton’s well-received defense of the law last year at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., where he laid out the intricate legislation in a way people could understand. But the White House clearly framed it that way in a tweet from Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer shortly after it was announced on Wednesday.
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“Excited to have President BillClinton, once dubbed Secretary of Explaining Stuff, talk about the health reform law on 9/4 in Little Rock,” read the tweet.
The venue is Bill Clinton’s home turf — his native Arkansas — and speaking in one of the poorest states in the nation could help him to highlight what the White House sees as the benefits of the bill.
The speech suggests that the relationship between Clinton and the White House will continue as long as there is a need in the final three years of Obama’s presidency — the period, of course, during which Hillary Clinton will decide whether to run again in 2016.
“He will lay down the facts about what is working and what is to come,” said a White House official of the speech.
“His Sept. 4th speech will be the first of a number of high-profile events and speeches by administration officials and allies throughout the fall aimed at raising awareness about the law. In addition to his remarks in Little Rock, President Clinton is also expected to continue to raise public awareness around the law during the critical months for open enrollment.”
Officials on both sides have tended to downplay the breathlessness with which every Clinton utterance related to Obama gets covered. Clinton’s usefulness goes only so far for Obama, but there is a recognition that he is seen as less polarizing than the president on certain topics.
And Clinton supporters argue that he gives many speeches that are similar to the one he’ll deliver next week, but they don’t all get written about.
Still, health care is an issue that both Clintons care deeply about. And as Clinton attempts to highlight that Republicans have offered no alternative to the bill that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld, his speech serves as a tacit reminder of how much work he and his wife put into health care early in his presidency.
Clinton has emerged as a big Obamacare booster over the past couple of years, working to calm a Democratic base that’s been either upset the law isn’t liberal enough or anxious about what could be a bumpy beginning.
The stakes are high: In about a month, millions will be able to start signing up for Obamacare coverage. But new polling shows about 40 percent of the public remains confused about whether Obamacare is still the law — let alone what’s actually in it.
Clinton’s Obamacare history most notably includes a dissertation on its benefits during his prime-time address at the convention, where President Barack Obama barely touched on his own signature law.
“Are we all better off because President Obama fought for health care reform? You bet we are,” Clinton said in Charlotte almost a year ago. He also slipped an Obamacare mention into his Wednesday speech marking the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“We cannot relax in our efforts to implement health care reform,” Clinton said from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In February, Clinton urged House Democrats nervous about the law’s rollout to focus on smooth implementation, also reassuring them that the party got the strongest health care bill through Congress that it could.
“It was the best bill you could have passed in the Congress given the filibuster circumstances,” Clinton said at the Democrats’ retreat. “It really matters how it’s implemented.”
While Clinton has acknowledged the massive health overhaul will require future fixes, he’s also cautioned against rushing to judgment on Obamacare’s ultimate impact — though Democrats and Republicans will be eager to diagnose the law’s success or failure early on.
“We really need about five years to see whether the drivers in the health care law, which clearly are trying to give incentives for people to be healthier and incentives for the system to give health care where you pay for results rather than procedure, to see if that works,” Clinton said at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit in May.
Clinton’s emphatic Obamacare support has erased a once-bitter divide between Obama and the Clinton camp over health care, specifically the law’s controversial requirement requiring individuals to carry insurance. Obama slammed Hillary Clinton’s support for the so-called individual mandate during the 2008 Democratic primary before eventually embracing it as the linchpin for his own health care law.
Bill Clinton even later admitted it was “good politics” for Obama to oppose the individual mandate on the campaign trail but he also credited Obama for adopting it.
“Most people running for president try to do as close to what they say they’re going to do as possible unless they were convinced they were wrong or circumstances had changed,” Clinton told The New York Times in a September 2012 interview. “We’re glad Lincoln didn’t keep his promise to not free the slaves.”
Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2008 but who campaigned for Obama last year, said the health care alliance is a net positive for both men.
“I think it’s a good thing for the country to have those two working together, especially on this issue,” Strickland said. “This issue, as we all remember, was an important policy issue that consumed quite a bit of time and energy in the first part of his first term. ”
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