December 2, 1993: Republican Strategist: Clinton Health Care Plan Must Be Stopped Because Its Success Would Endanger Republican Image

A still from the original ‘Harry and Louise’ TV commercial. [Source: American Environics]Neoconservative publisher and pundit William Kristol writes a five-page memo explaining why and how Republicans can ensure the Clinton administration’s health care proposal fails. The memo warns that if the Clinton health care plan is implemented, and actually improves the lives of Americans, the success of the program would badly damage the Republican Party by improving Americans’ relationship with government. Therefore, the plan must be stopped before it can begin. The memo’s strategy will be used in the powerful “Harry and Louise” media campaign, based on TV commercials featuring an older couple who worry that the program would destroy their relationships with their family doctor. Kristol writes in part: “Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedecented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy—and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. It’s [sic] success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.… The long term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse—much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependency for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.… Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president, and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.” In 2009, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent will note: “Here’s what’s striking about this. Kristol repeatedly says defeating Clinton on health care would deal a death knell to something that at the time already appeared on its way towards extinction—the ‘welfare-state,’ or the idea that government can improve the lives of the middle class. Kristol describes this idea as ‘firmly in retreat,’ in the process of being ‘rolled back,’ in need of ‘re-legitimizing.’ At the time the defeat of health care was viewed as a potential final victory over liberalism.” [Plum Line, 3/2/2009; Politico, 3/2/2009; Plum Line, 3/2/2009]