The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

Kristol, however, urged scorched-earth tactics to defeat reform. "Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the [Clinton] plan... is fine so far as it goes," he wrote. "But in the current climate, such opposition only wins concessions, not surrender. ... Any Republican urge to negotiate a |least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president |do something' about health care, should also be resisted."

It was Shermanesque: politics, and policy, as total war. In a subsequent Wall Street Journal piece in January, Kristol coined the mantra of GOP opposition: "Passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous.... There is no health care crisis." Despite the fact that we spend a third more for health care than the next-largest industrialized nation, have a disturbingly high rate of medical inflation, and lag behind other major countries on basic measures of health such as infant mortality, the line caught on. That it worked is a classic example of how Republicans buy off the vast middle class with appealing polemics and short-term fixes.

After bringing Dole (who began 1994 publicly scoffing at Kristol's no-crisis strategy but by midsummer was telephoning Kristol just to stay in touch), Gingrich (a longtime Kristol telephone pal), and others over to his position, Kristol explained how to move the debate entirely his way. "If we are to negotiate with Democrats over health care reform," Kristol wrote in a memo on June 7, "it must be on our terms, not theirs."

That prefigured what Dole - the 20-year-old "crisis" he once worried about long forgotten as the Clinton plan sunk in the polls - said at the July 19 meeting of the National Governors Association in Boston, where the president (briefly) abandoned his universal coverage pledge. "The health care system may not be perfect but it is the best in the world," said Dole, parroting Kristol's memos. "It needs repair but I'm not certain it needs a complete and total overhaul and certainly not a complete and total takeover by the federal government." Helpfully, the senator added, "I think the seeds of a bipartisan agreement still exist - if the administration is willing to come our way."

A singular triumph of tactics: the president on the run, appearing to break a fundamental promise, and the Republicans getting credit for saving the country from another damn giveaway program. Problem is, universal health insurance is anything but a giveaway program if you understand the problems in the current system.

"Our insight was that to beat Clinton we had to defend the quality of the current system," Kristol says now. He argued that most people, while they have generalized anxieties about health insurance and costs, are pleased with their own care. Since polls indicate that 60 to 80 percent of Americans are worried about things like losing coverage if they change jobs, Kristol argued that Republicans should appear to remedy those specific problems and close the deal.