Therefore, we in the Treasury thought that sometime—probably in the second quarter of 1994—Bentsen's personal policy staff would start feeling out Dole's personal policy staff on the issue. Then President Clinton would invite Sen. Dole to a private Oval Office meeting, after which Clinton would tell the cameras that the health-care legislative process had gotten bogged down and that he was seeking Sen. Dole's wise counsel to break the logjam.
Dole would then announce the Dole Compromise. This would provide the nation with desperately needed health-care reform. And it would provide Sen. Dole with a capstone achievement to a senate career that had been too often misspent spinning his wheels and backtracking.
As we all know, that scenario never happened. The Republican congressional delegation believed that President Clinton was in some sense illegitimate—Mr. 43%—having been elected only because Ross Perot hated George H.W. Bush and sabotaged his reelection. It was their business, they thought, to make Clinton's presidency appear a failure. And Sen. Dole, they said, needed to understand that his path to the Republican nomination and the White House lay not in sharing credit with Clinton for health-care reform but instead in advancing the Republican project of making Clinton's presidency appear a failure by blocking every single White House initiative they could.
Well, we all know how well 1996 turned out for Dole and the GOP.
Does anyone sense any McCain in all this?
And the lesson from all this?
The really interesting question is: What are America's senators now thinking, in the privacy of their vacation retreats or in the pandemonium of "town halls," about this ancient history? I have drawn what I think are appropriate lessons from it. First, Democratic senators do themselves no good either in the next world or in this when they block sensible initiatives from Democratic presidents. (But what lessons are Democrats Landrieu, Nelson, and Lincoln drawing?) Second, Republican senators do themselves no good either in this world or in the next when they block sensible initiatives from Democratic presidents. (But what lessons are Republicans Grassley, Voinovich, and Hatch drawing?)
