LOS ANGELES — After President Barack Obama on Wednesday made his latest pitch on how to proceed on health care, the political spotlight turned to the R-words: Republicans and reconciliation.
After a year of nasty partisan wrangling during which outnumbered Republicans proved they couldn’t be outgunned, Obama formally proposed his compromise package, one that the White House argued incorporated many GOP ideas. To get it passed, congressional leaders will have to use reconciliation, a process that requires just simple majorities, thus diminishing the GOP’s minority power.
“I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right,” Obama said in his East Room speech, sounding his main theme that action was urgently needed and that he was willing to lead regardless of the political fallout.
But political considerations were at the heart of Obama’s speech.
The president never used the word “reconciliation,” which Republicans have brandished like a club. Obama left no doubt he would advocate its use, though he repackaged it in less-threatening clothes.
“I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform,” Obama said. “. . . Now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that was used for COBRA health coverage for the unemployed and, by the way, for both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”
Polls show that when called a majority vote, the reconciliation procedure is something Americans tend to have fewer problems with than when it is called by its more esoteric version.
If Obama and the Democrats have tried to defuse the political issue surrounding the procedure, there is still the problem of content.
In his speech, Obama continued to stretch out his hand to Republicans, noting that the heart of the plan — financial exchanges — is a proposal Republicans should back because it is “an idea that many Republicans have embraced in the past.” Obama promised to include other GOP ideas as well.
Earlier, the White House posted an extensive list of GOP proposals it said it had incorporated into the final package. Though it is unlikely Republicans will now support the overall plan, the list was long enough to raise another question: Will liberal Democrats be able to support a bill that is so far from what they had wanted going into this debate more than a year ago?
And that is the crux of Obama’s political problem: In the search for any victory to assuage voter unhappiness with Washington’s gridlocked process and the lack of health care overhaul, has he alienated the very core of his House and electoral support needed to win passage of this health care package and to protect Democrats in November’s midterm elections?
