In the wake of the grinding health care fight, Obama’s campaign pledge of bipartisanship now seems hollow, either hopelessly naïve or deeply cynical. Middle ground shrinks in debate

As Barack Obama huddled with Senate Democrats in the walnut-paneled Mansfield Room in the Capitol this month, the man he beat for the presidency held court at a bank of television cameras outside to taunt his former foe.

“A year ago, the president of the United States ... [said] that when we get into health care reform, there will be Republicans in the room, Democrats in the room ... C-SPAN cameras,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told the clutch of journalists, reveling in the notion of catching Obama in the act of retreating on his promise.


McCain even directed the C-SPAN cameraman to “go right over to the meeting there because that was the commitment made.”

After nearly a year, this is what’s become of the health care debate: Democrats hunkered behind closed doors on a bill struggling to gain public support, Republicans lobbing one partisan grenade after the next.

In the wake of this grinding fight, Obama’s campaign pledge now seems hollow, either hopelessly naïve or deeply cynical. Far from being a show of bipartisan goodwill, the health care debate has proved to be just the opposite, with the most polarized, party-line votes on a sweeping social-reform bill in the modern era. No Republicans voted for the Senate bill Thursday. A single one backed the House version last month.

In the end, the political stakes proved to be too high — and the philosophical differences too great — for Obama to live up to his lofty rhetoric. In the face of steadfast GOP resistance to his plan, the president retreated from his gauzy campaign vision, eventually abandoning any notion that he’d undertake the sort of shirtsleeve cajoling and compromise he’d need to get Republicans on board.

Finally, Obama simply didn't need the Republicans - or C-Span cameras - to remake the health care system. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were able to corral enough Democrats to make them irrelevant. So the trio passed health care without them - betting the advantage gained from a political victory now would more than blot out any damage from abandoning Obama's old applause line.

Republican leaders, in turn, put an increasingly high value on blocking any hope of compromise — so much so that they never truly offered a comprehensive alternative plan until the very end. Digging in could rouse their dispirited base by defeating the liberal president on his signature issue, with the built-in rallying cry of facing down a “big government” health plan that defied conservative principles.

Fighting health care was a chance at rejuvenating the party, whose leaders were confident the country was as alarmed by Obama’s activist tendencies as they were, and comforted by polls that suggested that was the case.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told POLITICO that he embarked on a “very systematic and persistent” campaign since Memorial Day to undermine support for the president’s reform push, arguing that it would raise taxes, hike premiums and erduce Medicare. McConnell delivered more than 83 speeches on the Senate floor against reform.

And as Obama and the Republicans lapsed into these depressingly familiar roles, a political class that relies on these fights for its survival sprang into place to enable them. Advocates left and right amplified the talking points. Fundraisers breathlessly piggybacked on the cause. Twenty-four hour cable TV and websites cast a storyline in terms of the raw politics — who’s up and who’s down.

In the end, it’s not surprising that Obama and the Republicans couldn’t rise above decades of partisanship.

It’s more surprising that anyone harbored the notion they might.

"The bipartisanship that went on for 30 years was abnormal, and what you're seeing now is more normal," said former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, a Democrat from Missouri. "You've got to always remember that politics is a substitute for violence. ... If I disagree with you, it becomes very easy to not like you."

"Both parties have come to the view that to win elections, you need to deprive the other side of legislative victories,” Gephardt said. “If that's your political strategy, then that's your legislative strategy."

"It Deserved Bipartisan Defeat"

Of course, each side blames the other.

The White House says the Republicans couldn’t be trusted after they slapped away Obama’s pleas for help on the stimulus back in January and were never serious about helping the president on health care. From the early stages, Obama signaled to aides he was prepared to go it alone if necessary on health reform and that getting Republican votes to expand health care to 30 million Americans wouldn’t be the mark of whether it succeeded or failed.

Instead, the White House came to argue that as long as Republican ideas were included in the bill, that would meet Obama’s test of bipartisanship — whether they voted for it in the end or not.

“I don’t think we ever had thoughts that there would be significant Republican support for health care,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

If Obama has at least kept a flicker of bipartisanship alive — courting Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) to this day — the GOP leaders in the House and Senate made a decision in the spring to wage an all-out battle against Obama over health reform, aides and lawmakers said.

“For the public to understand there was a genuine debate about policy here, it was important for it not to become ‘bipartisan,’” McConnell said. “On the merits, this was a proposal that didn’t deserve, in my view, bipartisan support.”

“It deserved bipartisan defeat,” McConnell said.

“Their goal was to defeat the bill.”

Republican leadership avoided getting pinned down on its own ideas for reform — even discouraging one effort by House Republicans to craft a consensus alternative, a decision that frustrated a number of members because it forced them to wage the debate on Democratic terms.

“By deciding we were not going to produce our own product, we were deciding we were going to fight on their ground. We gave that ground to them,” said Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.).

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman who was a principal author of the House bill, criticized the GOP strategy.

“We wanted to cover all Americans, and we wanted to hold down health care costs," Waxman said. "Those two objectives could have been achieved in lots of different ways, but the Republicans didn’t engage us."

“They made it very clear from the very beginning, as in everything we do and everything we have tried to do, that they don’t want to do this,” added Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member. “I don’t know why people run for public office if that’s what they've got to offer.”

The risks of a one-party bill are considerable — and already some Republicans say revoking health reform will be a talking point for their candidates in the 2010 and 2012 elections. That’s the fear of many advocates, who say a health reform plan without broad bipartisan support might not survive.

“This issue is historic,” said Snowe, who voted for the bill in the Senate Finance Committee but voted no on the floor. “I mean, that would be the first time in a half a century that a historic piece of legislation could potentially be enacted along party lines. So hopefully we don’t make history in another way — that such an initiative passes along party-line votes. I think that would be a sad commentary on the political process.”

The White House doesn’t see it that way. Obama’s aides quickly became convinced that Republicans weren't willing to work with Obama — pointing to talk of “death panels” during the summer, a call to turn health care into Obama’s “Waterloo,” and the lack of a unified Republican alternative.

Republicans knew the same thing Democrats did — that, if Obama were to pass health care, it would be a presidential achievement on the level of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. And if he failed — if the Republicans could beat him — the consequences for Obama would be devastating.

"The Republican leaders were not on the level at any point here. Their goal was to defeat the bill," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said.

But the White House view is also that voters are more interested in the final results than in the details of whether the parties came together to make it happen.

"Passing health reform will be the greatest domestic legislative achievement since LBJ sat in the Oval Office," Pfeiffer said. "I am confident that in the short and long term this will be a huge momentum-building victory for the president, no matter how many Republicans vote for the bill."

Not the norm

Congress rarely passes landmark legislation along party lines. The House voted to enact Social Security in 1935 with 69 Republican votes. Thirty years later, 70 Republicans sided with the majority party to establish Medicare. Senate Republicans were similarly supportive of both historic bills. Both debates were excruciatingly partisan, but the final votes weren’t.

Today, the nation looks at Washington and sees little more than dysfunction and disputes, an erosion of political comity that seems the collective result of a piling up of political grievances for one side or the other — Vietnam, Watergate, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the disputed Florida election of George W. Bush. Obama’s agenda quickly drew GOP opposition as well.

It seemed as though all those ill feelings collided on the Senate floor this week. Angry, exhausted senators traded accusations of corruption and obstruction. And a series of last-minute deals by Reid to win support from his final holdouts only fed the perception — pushed by Republicans for months — that the legislation can't stand on its own merits.

In some ways, health reform’s partisan path was laid down mere days after Obama took office, when House Republicans rebuffed him, offering Obama not a single vote on his stimulus plan even after he paid them a visit to seek their votes. Only three senators backed the plan.

Both sides came away from the vote feeling burned — which colored the health reform talks from the start.

“Mutually Justified Suspicion”

Still, the White House made early overtures to the GOP. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the architect of the Democrats’ takeover of Congress in 2006, met with a dozen or so moderate Republicans on the patio outside his West Wing office. Obama stopped by for 20 or so minutes to hear their ideas. Emanuel even provided sandwich wraps. But that was the last such session.

On the Hill, Democrats met with Republicans in small groups and one-on-one. “I actually thought early on, they were making all the right moves,” said Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means panel. “But things changed.”

By June, it was clear Democrats were heading in a fundamentally different direction from what all but a handful of Republicans could accept — with a government-run health insurance plan that Republicans saw as an end-run to create a system of single-payer government-run health care on par with countries in Europe.

“It was mutually justified suspicion,” said Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.), the chairman of a key subcommittee who held numerous meetings with rank-and-file Republicans.

“Stop Right There”

One meeting that captured the sense of impasse between the parties came in June, when Obama’s health czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, was dispatched to the Hill to meet with GOP leaders.

In a session with Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip, DeParle tried to gauge his support for the public option. Sitting in his third-floor Capitol office with a bowl of M&Ms between them, she explained the need for reform and started to lay out reasons why a public option would be the most effective tool to lower costs and increase competition, before Cantor cut her off.

“Stop right there,” Cantor said. “I’m not convinced.”

The Virginia Republican said he wanted to work with the White House to revamp the health care system but believed that government agencies are inherently less efficient than the private sector. The conversation, while cordial, fell flat from that point on, Cantor recently recounted. The meeting proved to be their last.

Republicans offered an alternative the week before the House vote that was widely panned because it only covered 3 million uninsured Americans — a far cry from the 36 million that Democrats covered in the House bill.

A Senate effort at bipartisanship on the Senate Finance Committee foundered in the heat of August, when angry crowds swarmed town hall meetings across the country. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was talking to Democrats but at one point seemed to embrace GOP talk of “death panels” — without using the term — infuriating the White House.

Grassley insists the White House and Democratic leadership “got impatient and they shoved us aside.” And he said he personally asked Obama at the White House to take the public option off the table as a way to foster bipartisan support, but Obama “never answered.” Democrats have since dropped the public option from the bill to stave off opposition from Democratic moderates.

High-wire act

The partisan impasse holds political peril for both parties. Republicans have staked their political success on the Democrats' failure to enact legislation after an upcoming House-Senate conference committee — or the failure of that legislation once it’s enacted. Democrats could gain big if health reform proves popular — or suffer for years at the ballot box if the programs falter.

Most experts see the far greater peril for Obama.

"Obama and the Democrats have no choice at this point — they must pass something,” said James Thurber, founder of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “However, it is a high-risk strategy not to have the Republicans at the table from the beginning of this process.”

Republicans are more confident than ever that the party will reap significant rewards in the 2010 elections, with polls down on health reform and a quartet of red-state House Democrats calling it quits. First-year Rep. Parker Griffith recently announced he’s switching parties to become a Republican, citing the Democrats’ health care bill as a big reason why.

Snowe sees it differently.

“There's plenty of responsibility and blame to go around — no question about that,” Snowe said. “It's unfortunate because I think the American people would expect rightfully that on a question of this order that we could do better, and we could have.”

Carrie Budoff Brown and Meredith Shiner contributed to this story.