Hillary Clinton and SCHIP: The Unvarnished Truth and The Massaged Talking Points

[gwojtowy]

So now nothing is sacred. Not even something as laudable as the bipartisan coming together on the Children's Health Insurance Program! The very people who credited Hillary for her role in it's passage, are now so mercenary as to deny her any credit for CHIP at all! Well, in order to do this they'll have to talk out of the other sides of their mouths.

Back then, when it was passed, they were more than happy to heap praise on Hillary for persuading Bill to come around on the deal, so they could pressure Trent Lott to roll over. Kennedy had then acknowledged that the First Lady had a very important role in getting the White House on board.

From the Boston Globe October 6, 2007:

The children's health program wouldn't be in existence today if we didn't have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue," Kennedy told The Associated Press.

President Clinton signed the bill in August 1997.
While Kennedy is widely viewed as the driving force behind the program, by all accounts the former first lady's pressure was crucial.

It goes on to state:

'She wasn't a legislator, she didn't write the law, and she wasn't the president, so she didn't make the decisions,' says Nick Littlefield, then a senior health adviser to Kennedy. 'But we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it.'

Well, what a pair of witnesses! Not just Ted Kennedy, but one of his senior health advisors!

The story goes that Bill was a little wary on account of his negotiating a balanced budget with Lott, who called the children's health bill a "deal buster."

But in another article in the New York Times from August 11, 2000, Littlefield again states:

'She was a one-woman army inside the White House to get this done,' Mr. Littlefield of the Health, Education and Labor Committee said. He said that he and Senator Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who was the major force behind the bill, enlisted Mrs. Clinton's help in the spring of 1997 when the president became 'skittish' about the program. Mr. Littlefield said the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, was threatening that it was a ''deal buster' on the balanced budget agreement that he and Mr. Clinton had reached.

'At that point we went to Mrs. Clinton and said, 'You've got to get the president to come around on this thing,' ' Mr. Littlefield said. 'And she said, 'Absolutely.' And we very quickly noticed a change. The president was very much on board.'

How times have changed!

Now that two factions have emerged in the struggle for the nomination, legislators who cooperated with one another now belittle each other.

After the Hillarycare debacle of 1993, Hill and Bill decided three things:

• Secretive decision making was not working.

• Hillary had to keep a low profile if she was to be of any legislative use to her pet projects.

And so, some people must've gotten confused or something. Someone played telephone and a whole lot of hats got hung on an innacuracy. The Washington Post says:

During months of SCHIP negotiations in 1997, her name rarely surfaced in news accounts. Clinton never testified before Congress or held a news conference on the bill. When Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the lead GOP negotiator of the children's health bill, heard reports that Clinton was depicting herself as SCHIP's main advocate, 'I had to blink a few times," he said. Hatch said he doesn't recall a single conversation with Clinton about SCHIP, even a mention of her name. "If she was involved, I didn't know about it,' he said.

'You know how she says, 'I started SCHIP'? Well, so did I," joked Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), one of the Democrats who pushed the bill across the finish line along with Kennedy. Both have endorsed Obama.'

I guess Senator Rockefeller didn't get the very Clintonesque strategy of bypassing obstacles if you can't remove them. Kennedy and Hatch wanted to attach SCHIP to the budget bill as an amendment. Clinton knew that Lott wouldn't go for that, and according to Gene Sperling, the White House chose to back it as a seperate bill:

"Gene Sperling, a former chief economic adviser in the Clinton White House, said the budget resolution never would have passed the House with the Hatch-Kennedy amendment in it. He said that both the president and his wife wanted the SCHIP program and that Hillary Clinton lobbied hard to get it included in subsequent legislation."

Of course, Senators Kennedy and Hatch, who have both endorsed other candidates, acknowledge support by the White House, but try to play down the support of Hillary. Yet, according to the Boston Globe Sperling gives a different account:

Gene Sperling, a Hillary Clinton campaign adviser who served as one of President Clinton's lead budget negotiators in 1997, said efforts to include children's health coverage were constrained by a balanced budget agreement between the White House and Republican congressional leaders.

But he said Hillary Clinton pushed hard and even favored boosting the price tag to $24 billion, instead of the $16 billion that had been floated as a compromise.

'Her office was across from mine, and I knew what her priorities were," Sperling said. "I remember her having a lot of influence -- you're getting this done because you know the first lady wants it.'

And so, the Obama partisans either in error, or deliberately, downplay Hillary's legislative history as First Lady and use her misperceived inaction in this area as a politcal football against her.

But the high profile legislators ought to know better. Their legislative histories are recorded ad infinitum, and makes their words over time seem untrustworthy concerning Hillary:

'Last fall, Kennedy said SCHIP "wouldn't be in existence' without Clinton's support inside the White House. But when her rhetoric on the campaign trail started to filter back to the Capitol, the veteran legislator became stingier with his praise.

'At the last hour, the administration supported it, and she was part of the administration, so I suppose she could say she supported it at the time," Kennedy said.'