Weren't you, like, seven when this happened? Were you already a health care wonk by the time you learned to ride a bicycle?

By the way, the first ten minutes of your BHTV w/ Chris felt like a college sociology seminar as well.

I don't know what Obama is doing with this, and it probably is enough to make someone question how serious Obama is on healthcare.

It's not like Jim Cooper disapeared after 1994. Well, not permanantly anyway.

And you wonder why some of us are uncomfortable with both Hillary and Obama. They both choose to surround themselves with shady people. It's funny in a way that Obama is troting out Cooper. Isn't it well known that the Clinton hate his guts?

Forgive me if I find Brad DeLong, who was actually involved in the Hillarycare debacle, to be more credible than you on this issue.

John:
Did you even read what Ezra wrote? Or followed any of the links? Have you read up on Jim Cooper at all? Or do you prefer talking out your ass?

I am an Obama supporter, but my recollection of Jim Cooper's role corresponds with Ezra's description. Cooper played a key role in killing health care reform in 1993. No other Democrat played as destructive role.

One can only hope that Obama has co-opted Cooper in support of Obama's health care proposals and not the reverse.

Let me try and split the difference here.

The from-the-left argument is that Cooper made a preemptive strike against any proposal for universality, gave Blue Dogs and moderate Republicans a bill to point to, and generally sold things down the river. The from-the-center argument is that what the Clinton's ended up supporting was totally untenable in Congress, and that the legislative affairs people and various economic (and health!) advisors would have told Clinton this if only they could have locked Ira Magaziner in a dungeon for six months.

One could imagine a world in which the Rockefellers and Coopers of the world were assuaged, but the White House still fought for universal or near universal coverage. Who to blame for this is unclear; I'm more inclined to blame Cooper for so clearly jumping the gun.

Actually, you can follow the final link to Mike Lux, who was in the administration. But "I was there" is not a relevant comeback here. We have the full accounts of the process. We can figure out who is right.

The Dems have had 15 yrs to figure out what a Dem. Congress (with workable majorities) might support in the way of detailed legislation. There hasn't been even one comprehensive proposal advanced, and neither the Hillary nor Barak plan is anywhere near a legislative proposal.

Why is that?

It's clear to me that there isn't a Dem. majority for any one general outline, and surely isn't agreement on specific details. One may argue that a Presidential campaign (when one looks to gain the largest voting position by eliding most of the details of any proposal) isn't the forum for draft legislation. But... 15 years and no plan!

Clinton seemingly hasn't learned much from the failure the first at-bat, and Obama has accepted a 'doesn't solve the problem' (Cooper analogue) approach before the the battle has begun.

There will be no universal health care in the US in a generation, if ever. Corporatist medicine has its teeth and claws into the body politic so deeply that removing them will cause fatal bleeding of the body.

Fatalist? You bet. This Obama/Clinton/Edwards dustup has shown that the Dems can never unite internally on this topic, and only a damned fool will believe that the GOP is in any way going to cooperate with the Dems to do anything that weakens the corporate stranglehold over health care.

So, does it matter which candidate is 'right' or will 'win' on the Dem. side. Not a bit.

Well, if we're talking about Jim Cooper of Tennessee (and I suspect we are), he is my Congressman. I wouldn't call him a "conservative Democrat," at least, not by Tennessee standards (that distinction goes to my STATE Senator, Douglas Henry, who has some rather antiquated views on rape).

Cooper isn't predictable, though. He has taken some controversial positions, and he isn't one to play politics. He stands by his convictions no matter what, which often puts him at odds with more liberal Democrats like Steve Cohen of Memphis, but it also tends to tick off the Republican delegation.

I can't defend his position on universal healthcare, but do think he'd be open to listening to people about this issue. He's not always right, but I've found him to at least be fair.

And I have to say he's been a ray of light for someone living with two GOP Senators (including, until recently
one named Frist).

Ezra, you should know by now that Obama's choice of Cooper as surrogate for health care is actually evidence of his superior commitment to universal care. Unlike that shrieking harpy, Obama understands that only [mumblemumble] will get everyone perfect health care, and soon. He's our only Hope.

You're an evil person for not agreeing with me. Same with Krugman.

On a slightly more substantive note, I'm not sure JimP.OR's concerns make complete sense. He refers to a "Obama/Clinton/Edwards dustup" when, in fact, Clinton and Edwards had no substantive disagreements over health care. And although I follow Ezra's line on the centrality of mandates, Obama's plan is actually pretty similar to the other two - if he hadn't made mandates an attack line, his plan could have ended up indistinguishable form theirs.

Meanwhile, the statement "Clinton seemingly hasn't learned much from the failure the first at-bat" ignores the two central facts to HRC's plan: it's very different from the 1994 proposal, in nearly every aspect, and it is a loose framework for legislators to fill in. Her previous plan was a my-way or the highway fait accompli that the Congress resented.

Finally, Congress hasn't addressed UHC in 15 years because there've only been 2 presidents in that time: one who had given it his best shot, and couldn't realistically return to it, and one who would have vetoed anything the least bit feasible. The last 15 years tell us nothing about UHC in Congress.

Say what you will about the unlikelihood of UHC success, these objections don't amount to much.

It isn't so much the content of Ezra's post as the tone which irked me. "Sorry, but Brad is precisely wrong on this"? De Long was there. Ezra is obviously free to disagree with him, but the cavalierness of it is obnoxious. Ezra was nine, and DeLong was actually working for the Clinton White House on health care at the time. He deserves at least some respect.

Agreed with John, re: Ezra's tone in dismissing Brad DeLong. I think a lot of people who disagree with Ezra's analysis on mandates would be much less vehement if he tempered the language a bit.

I think JRoth raises some interesting points, but the thing that worries me about HRC's plan is the lack of specificity (a lesson that, yes, she drew from 1993-4.) A well-designed, well-implemented mandate is theoretically a great idea; a mediocre design for a mandate would probably produce some really terrible results along with an enormous backlash against government involvement in health care (as well as Democrats.) So while it would be a mistake for Clinton to declare that it's her plan or nothing, I just don't see how anyone can be confident that her nonspecific plan is the answer.

Actually, the first line was a nod to the first line of Brad's post, which was "Paul Krugman simply has this completely wrong." Krugman was alive too, deserves respect, blah blah blah. Moreover, I don't know how too separate people who lived through those events could remember them differently. It's almost as if memory isn't the most applicable tool here, and there are other methods we could use...

Why do you keep pretending Ezra's age has anything to do with this? We have everyone's account of what happened, we know why they are making the judgments they are making. We can look at the evidence for ourselves and figure out what went down.

The people who were there at the time can't agree, and it's not as if Jim Cooper was otherwise reliable.

Brad is right and Ezra is wrong and I say this as someone who both served on the Clinton Healthcare Task Force and worked for a member of Congress on a committee with jurisdiction over the bill.

I can't stand Jim Cooper and there was no doubt he was trying to use the issue to help win Al Gore's Senate seat which he failed to do. However, to pin the failure to get a bill to the House floor on Cooper is a bit much. The House Dems were so entrenched and fractured at that point there were so many culprits for the failure.

I love Jim McDermott but he was just as destructive from the left on health care in 1993-94 by insisting on a single payer bill and being so unwilling to compromise that he forced Stark, Rostenkowski and Gibbons to cut deals with more conservative Ways and Means Committee members in order to get a bill out. I went to countless single payer or nothing meetings led by McDermott and his staff and while I was sympathetic I also knew it was unrealistic. The votes weren't there to pass a bill.

As Brad mentioned there was John Breaux, a much bigger player than Cooper, because the Senate was having more success moving a bill.

John Dingell deserves some blame for stacking the Energy and Commerce Committee with lots of Jim Cooper and Billy Tauzin types because he knew they would vote with him and against Henry Waxman on clean air bills (yes that fight is that old). What he didn't realize is that strategy would come back to bite him on things like health care were Dingell was much more liberal.

If I were to place the blame anywhere it would be squarely on the shoulders of Ira Magaziner who developed a proposal that only a management consultant could like which is what he was prior to joining the Clinton Admin. In a theoretical sense, the bill wasn't bad but it didn't make sense in the real world because it had no constituency. It managed to piss everyone off from consumer groups to businesses to hospitals to doctors to insurers. He had no feel for public policy or politics and might have been the most arrogant person I ran across during my time in DC which says a lot.

I'd like Jim Cooper to go away but I do not think he alone is to blame for the failure to produce a health care bill in 1993-94. If the Clinton Admin had sent a better bill to Hill they might have gotten something.