IRA MAGAZINER.

In my posts on health care reform, and Daschle in particular, I often bring up Ira Magaziner's disastrous performance as head of Clinton's health effort. This is not only conventional wisdom, it is the sum of a lot of reporting. It is almost impossible to get through a conversation on the failures of 1994 without enduring a long soliloquy on Magaziner's failures. But I haven't spent much time explaining what he did wrong on this blog. As a first point, I'll just link to this article, and note that when you're talking about the process, you're talking about Magaziner's process, and his decisions. So there's that. There's also Brad DeLong's post on the 1994 reforms, and his analysis of Magaziner is well-stated and syncs with most everything I've heard:

It is hard to tell how much power Hillary Rodham Clinton had. Certainly she did not effectively manage the process. But I did see Ira Magaziner in action. And it seems to me that the process was impossible to manage as long as Ira Magaziner was involved, and perhaps she did not have the power to fire him.

Magaziner, you see, had two major flaws. His first was that his instinct was always to make things more complicated. Faced with a choice between doing 90% of a job with an organization that has 10% of the present complexity and doing 100% of a job with 200% of the present complexity, he would always choose the second. He had no sense that complicated organizations tend to break, to exhibit bizarre and unplanned behaviors, and are hard to explain--but he had never run and had spent little time working in large human organizations, and when he got his chance to do so during health-care reform he rapidly proved to be incompetent at marshalling resources and using his people's time effectively.

His second flaw was that he thought like a management consultant. A management consultant's principal goal is to win a debate in front of his employer, the senior decision maker, the "Principal." You win a debate by making intellectual arguments, controlling the flow of information to the senior decision maker, walling-off potential adversaries from the process, and winning the confidence of the Principal by telling him things that he likes to hear: that he is smart, that his goals can be achieved, that the nay-sayers just don't grasp the issues. But that's not how you develop a policy. You develop a policy by forming a large coalition all of whom agree that the proposal will make the world a better place, and that it is close to the best that can be attained at the current moment. Then you have a large group of people who are enthusiastic about the proposal: they will go out and make your arguments for you. The compromises and concessions that had to be made within the policy-planning group in order to form the coalition will then perform a very important exterior purpose: just as they brought people within the process onboard, so they will bring other people outside the process who think in a similar fashion onboard as well. For a management consultant, it doesn't matter if everyone else in the organization hates your guts as long as the Principal--the CEO--is convinced, for the CEO is the boss and can then make things happen. For a policy planner, winning the confidence of the Principal is almost beside the point: instead, the point is forming a coalition that can then be extended to win a majority of the House of Representatives, the 60 votes in the Senate to end a filibuster, and a Presidential signature.

So those were his two maor flaws: a love of complexity, and the instincts of a consultant--no, three major flaws: his judgment was also very poor...Combine Magaziner's flaws with the sense at the start of 1993 that possibilities were unbounded--that, as one (anonymous) senior White House aide put it, no one in the White House "...was thinking about the fact that Bill Clinton got only 43 percent of the votes. He was on top of the world. He was young, he was good-looking, he gave a good speech. The world was full of hope"--and you have the setting for a policy-planning disaster.

And the policy-planning disaster duly took place, for Magaziner set up a process that was the antithesis of the coalition-forming, doubt-resolving, opposition-coopting process needed to construct a viable legislative proposal. As Johnson and Broder put it, Magaziner wanted a non-standard design. He wanted "...outside experts to challenge the conventional views.... to keep the veteran policy-network players [out]... [to keep] the final key decisions... [in the hands of] three people," the President, the First Lady, and Ira Magaziner. That this turned out to be a bad idea did not come as a surprise. At the very start of the Clinton Administration Donna Shalala, HHS Secretary, and Alice Rivlin, Deputy Director of OMB, were especially vocal at stating their belief that the Magaziner process was not "a disciplined policy-development process that would result in a piece of legislation that was fully vetted."

But don't blame Magaziner for the whole thing. Blame the guy who chose him--Bill Clinton.

Tom Daschle certainly has flaws. But they are not these flaws. Brad is correct to put the eventual blame on the way Magaziner's failings led to "a process that was the antithesis of the coalition-forming, doubt-resolving, opposition-coopting process needed to construct a viable legislative proposal." The thing that Daschle actually knows how to do is "the coalition-forming, doubt-resolving, opposition-coopting process needed to construct a viable legislative proposal." It's an important difference.