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The defeat by the Republicans of President Clinton's sweeping health care initiative was a critical turning point in modern American politics. A disaster for the Democrats, it led to the Republican conquest of Congress in 1994. Theda Skocpol rejects the prevailing view, which lays most of the blame at the feet of Hillary Rodham Clinton, offering the real culprit as something called "Reagan's revenge." She believes that the tax cuts of the Reagan years gutted a host of once-effective federal programs, generating widespread public mistrust of government. An incisive look at Clinton's defeat on health care, Boomerang also provides a fresh, and at times frightening, perspective on the legacy of the Reagan years.
From Publishers Weekly
President Clinton's defeated health care reform proposal was not the cost-raising, byzantine, cumbersome, choice-restricting mess that critics made it out to be, according to Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard. The Clinton initiative, she insists, would have led, over time, to significantly less government involvement than we have now; its proposed regulations of insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, employers and state governments would have driven down costs and discouraged excessive spending on high-tech medicine, she maintains. In her scenario, Clinton's bill served as a convenient foil for ideologically committed Republicans who rallied the public against the Democrats and against federal social legislation in general, thus paving the way for the Republican triumph in the 1994 congressional elections. While her analysis is often unconvincing, her trenchant critique of the Clinton administration's failure to build a coalition to deepen public support for its health plan holds important lessons for all who wish to revitalize the Democratic Party. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
