Clinton's Plan: DOA?

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Though Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen had sent many of the same signals the week before, the headlong retreat by the President sent the true believers in Clinton's camp around the bend. Several suggested privately that he did not understand his own plan; others complained that the desire to be liked had again gotten the better of the President. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, who alone has stuck with the Clinton plan through thick and thin and obviously felt abandoned, grabbed a microphone at a Senate Finance Committee hearing and lectured the President in absentia. "Like the President, I've been a Governor. I like Governors, and I like being around Governors. But I'm more interested in health care than in the collegial feeling of being with Governors." Rockefeller was not alone in his dismay. 'It's the side of Bill Clinton that scares everybody," said another top adviser to the health-care team. "When you push him, he doesn't stick to his guns."

Clinton instantly fired back. "Senator Rockefeller is a wonderful man," he declared. "But he made a big mistake: he read a press report and assumed it was true." Within hours, however, White House officials affirmed the signals were no accident. Caps on insurance premiums, they said, might not be the only way to help drive down costs. As for the cumbersome alliances, they might well turn out to be smaller than the 5,000-person minimum outlined in the Clinton plan. Stated Jeff Eller, director of White House media affairs: "We've said all along, 'You want to take the alliances down from 5,000 to 4,500? Fine, let's talk.' "

The President's comments to the Governors were tied to a deliberate if somewhat confusing White House strategy: as Clinton feels his way toward a compromise bill, he must make concessions to moderate lawmakers now to prevent rival plans from gaining strength. If the Governors' package did not mirror the Clinton plan in every way -- the Governors balked at requiring employers to pay for 80% of workers' insurance premiums -- Clinton knows the outcome could have been much worse. An aide to a senior Democrat on Capitol Hill described the White House tactics this way: "They don't know what they're going to have to endorse down the road, so they don't want to draw lines in the sand that they may have to cross later."

That helps to explain why the White House tried to prevent the Business Roundtable from embracing the Cooper plan last Wednesday. For weeks Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, national economics chief Robert Rubin and Magaziner had been telephoning corporate CEOs, urging them to stay on the fence and "keep your powder dry." Hillary Rodham Clinton made calls and was host to nearly a dozen CEOs at the White House, where the President himself dropped by to urge them to keep their options open. But the next day, the Roundtable backed the Cooper measure "as a starting point" by better than 2 to 1.

Many on Capitol Hill said Rubin, Altman and other Wall Streeters on the Clinton team had deluded themselves about their ability to woo big business and had inflated the influence of the Roundtable as well. Congressman Jim McDermott, whose Canadian-style single-payer plan is anathema to Roundtable types, said the White House was wrong to think it would "ever get the support of people who don't want Bill Clinton to get re-elected."