Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

A new president faces his first major legislative test, and the portents do not look good. His majorities in both houses are rickety; key House and Senate members are voting no. If his proposal fails, the political fallout will be enormous, and he will be labeled a failure.

That’s exactly what Bill Clinton faced in 1993, and his near-death experience demonstrates two lessons: First, “saving my presidency” is a powerful argument; and second, “winning” may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.


Clinton entered office with strong majorities in both houses: 57 senators, 258 House members. But he’d won without coattails. Thanks to Ross Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote, almost every Democrat in Congress had run ahead of Clinton. And Perot was more significant. His focus on the deficit imposed a heavy political weight on Clinton, especially when the outgoing Bush administration revealed that the deficit—a then-staggering $282 billion—would be billions higher than forecast.

That fact meant that Clinton had to walk a tightrope between keeping his campaign promises of significant new investments, and the demand for action on the deficit. That demand was strengthened by the fact that Clinton had surrounded himself with economic conservatives, like Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Wall Street’s Robert Rubin. (Their emphasis on deficit reduction—which would lead, they argued, to lower interest rates—caused James Carville to proclaim that when he was reincarnated, “I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”)

The resulting bill—the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act—had just enough bad-tasting medicine in it to drive some key Democrats away from support. A “BTU tax”—a precursor of a carbon tax—meant that senators from energy-producing states, like Oklahoma’s David Boren, would be opposed. So was New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg, whose suburban constituents wanted no part of the plan. And those defections were costly because every single Republican in both houses of Congress opposed the bill—a foreshadowing of what the next Democratic president would face.

As the vote neared, the White House fell back on one key argument to wavering members: Losing this vote will effectively destroy my presidency. That argument was enough to persuade Pennsylvania’s Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky to cast the 218th vote that gave the bill its majority. (Republicans serenaded her with “Bye, bye, Marjorie” as she left the well of the House.)

The Senate was equally close. On the eve of the vote, Clinton had 49 votes; he needed 50 to enable vice president Al Gore to break the tie. And the one senator whose vote was up for grabs was Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey—no fan of the president. (He would later describe Clinton as “an unusually good liar.”)

After days in seclusion, followed by a contentious phone call with Clinton—Kerrey took the guidance of New York Senator Daniel Moynihan. “I decided,” he said, “that I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your presidency.”

That argument is now being directed at dissident House Republicans. Its potency is one reason why a gambler would be well disposed to bet that Obamacare repeal will pass the House, letting the fight move to the Senate and buying time for accommodation with the bill’s Republican foes.

But there’s another lesson here. While Clinton got his tax and budget bill through Congress, the political costs were high. There was no immediate economic boom, and in 1994, Republicans were able to turn their argument about “highest the increase in history” into a midterm electoral rout, even though it was not exactly true. Democrats lost both houses of Congress, and the House and Senate remained in GOP hands for the rest of the Clinton presidency. That effectively ended any chance for Clinton to initiate a bold legislative agenda, and—not so incidentally—gave Republicans the votes they needed in the House to impeach him.

Now it is Trump who needs wavering members of his party to come to his rescue. His argument—that voting against repeal may cost Republicans their seats—does have resonance. Unlike Clinton in 1993, Trump has a base within the rank and file. Had Clinton threatened Democrats with a warning that he’d campaign against them, just about every member of Congress would have laughed in his face. A promise/threat from Trump would have to be taken seriously, even though the last president who tried to “purge” disloyal members of Congress—that would be FDR in 1938—was singularly unsuccessful.

There is, however, a counterweight: the prospect that by 2018, the impact of “Trumpcare” will be start to be felt; and if the analyses of the Congressional Budget Office, the Kaiser Family Foundation and others are correct, the impact will be felt most sharply among older, less affluent, working-class Americans … in other words, Trump’s base. If that prospect ripens into reality, what would be celebrated as a legislative triumph may wind up as an epic disaster.

So even if Trump manages to win with Clinton’s most powerful argument—“save my presidency!”—it may be that the political consequences of Obamacare repeal will turn out to be a classically Pyrrhic victory.

