No Tennessee Waltz: can Fred Thompson make his race against Jim Cooper a referendum on Clinton Lite? - Tennessee Senate race between Republican Fred Thompson and Democrat Jim Cooper

National Review, June 27, 1994 by Geoffrey Morris

Can Fred Thompson make his race against Jim Cooper a referendum on Clinton Lite?

Whether or not Dan Rostenkowski's absence means an end to health-care legislation as we know it, the issue is at the forefront of the Tennessee Senate race between Republican Fred

Thompson and Democrat Jim Cooper for the seat that Al Gore vacated when he became Vice President. Thompson, a former U. S. attorney and Watergate prosecutor, wet his feet politically running Howard Baker's congressional campaigns in the Sixties and Seventies. He later entered private law practice - fighting the mob and the government. Shortly thereafter he began to moonlight on the silver screen: playing G-men in numerous films and, most recently, a graff White House Chief of Staff in Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire. His characters have all been versions of himself: burly lumbering, and quietly commanding. In fact, his acting career began in Marie, starring Sissy Spacek, in which he actually plays himself, as the attorney who helped bring down Democratic Governor Ray Blanton for corruption.

"I've always been an advocate, and that's still true now," he says. "It's time to stand up against big government, to stand up against all this nonsense going on up there in Washington.... Howard Baker was right when he said that we could measure the downfall of the Republic from the day they air-conditioned the Capitol. We need a law that says that Congress cannot be in session more than half the year."

But more realistic policy proposals are likely to dominate campaign debate - especially health care, which is the issue that put Jim Cooper, a six-term representative from Shelbyville, on the national political map. Indeed, last fall his health-care plan was touted as the only real alternative to the Clinton plan.

Cooper's career parallels Clinton's at many points. He breezed through the University of North Carolina in just three years, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then to Harvard Law. But politics has always been in his blood (his father, Prentice, was governor in the Sixties). So after practicing law for two years, he ran for an open House seat in 1982 against Cissy Baker, Howard's daughter. He won easily. At 27, he was the youngest member of the House.

Cooper has tried assiduously to position himself to the right of Clinton in the health-care debate, dubbing his managed-competition plan "Clinton Lite" - intended as a favorable label. A friendly media helped market it. The press reiterated Cooper's claim that "this is the first health-reform approach since Harry Truman to get major Democrat and Republican support." (In fact, as Trudy Lieberman points out in the Columbia Journalism Review, in 1983, to name just one instance, Republicans joined with congressional Democrats to change Medicare-payment systems.) Everyone from ABC News and the New York Times to the Washington Times and U.S. News & World Report labeled Cooper's bill a middle-of-the-road plan, "the one most likely to succeed."

Its early strengths were that 1) it wasn't the Clinton plan and 2) few people had actually read it. Once scrutinized, it sank in popularity. It has fewer co-sponsors now than two months ago. Its biggest setback came in May when a Congressional Budget Office report revealed that it could increase the federal deficit $35 billion annually ($301 billion over ten years). And, said CBO, the plan would still leave 24 million people uninsured.

Single-payer proponent Representative Pete Stark (D., Calif) says the Cooper plan is "all pap and blather. Everybody's got to love it because it doesn't do anything." In fact, it would do quite a bit. It would limit choice, force employers toward plans that offered fewer services, and drive people into government-controlled alliances.

"The plan is a product of someone who has spent his life in government," says Daniel Casse of the Project for the Republican Future. "Cooper, like Clinton, is fascinated with government and thinks he can make it work. But in fact the plan is extraordinarily destructive to people's lives."

"The Cooper plan comes out of the hide of the middle-class taxpayer," says Robert Moffit in a March Heritage Foundation report. "The Cooper plan would allow companies to deduct only an amount equal to the cost of the cheapest health plan" in any of the regional alliances. Any amount above that would be taxed at the normal corporate rate, now 35 per cent. "Companies," says Moffit, "Will seek to avoid the new federal tax by reducing benefits in their health packages ... You can't go after business and not expect to hurt employees."

The Cooper people shrug off such criticism as politics. The plan is untested, but yes, it will work, they say. But as John Hood points out below, managed competition is being tested in Cooper's own Tennessee, and the results are less than satisfactory. Just like Cooper's plan, TennCare aims to improve delivery, insure more people, and lower costs. At present, it seems to be failing on all counts.

"It's very unpopular among physicians providers," says F. Lee Smith, publisher of The Tennessee Journal, a weekly political newsletter. "But the question for Thompson is: Can he tie Cooper to the Democratic health-care albatross? Clinton's a tremendous liability for candidates in our part of the country. Nevertheless, Cooper has cleverly placed himself against Clinton on health care. Thompson's job is to wipe away that difference." Thompson is clearly trying to do just that. "Both TennCare and Cooper's health plan are radical departures from standard practice," says press secretary Dick Kopper. "TennCare is being tested right now and it has rattled the state with foul-ups. What's going to happen if this sort of thing happens nationally?"