The “Hillary Clinton Health Care Memos” show that the Clintons were willing to destroy everyone in order to push through their health care reforms.

Yesterday, “Captain” Ed Morrissey published several posts about “Hillary Clinton health care memos.” All posts, three in total, should be read in full, including the articles Ed links to.

What’s going on? Well, it seems that shortly after Bill Clinton took office a task force was created which had to come up with health care reforms and which had to find a way to push these reforms through. The motto? Whatever’s necessary. The ends justify the means.

This means, among other things, that they believed they should try to “personally discredit” opponents of the plan. More about that later in this post.

Lets start with a memo written by someone with the initials P.S. I’ve got no idea who that person may be, Ed implied yesterday on his radio show that he has a hunch, but I don’t. This P.S. person wrote about the health care reform: “I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy…Is the public really ready for this?… none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all…”

The memo basically means that opponents of the plan were right: unprecedented and it may not even work.

But how to deal with people who said that publicly?

Senator J. Rockefeller had an idea:

A “Confidential” May 26, 1993 Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, “Health Care Reform Communications,” which criticizes the Task Force as a “secret cabal of Washington policy ‘wonks’” that has engaged in “choking off information” from the public regarding health care reform. The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton “use classic opposition research” to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton Administration from Task Force deliberations and to “expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists” in order to deflect criticism…

A February 5, 1993 Draft Memorandum from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux detailing the Office of Public Liaison’s plan for the health care reform campaign. The memorandum notes the development of an “interest group data base” detailing whether or not organizations “support(ed) us in the election.” The database would also track personal information about interest group leaders, such as their home phone numbers, addresses, “biographies, analysis of credibility in the media, and known relationships with Congresspeople.”

Of course, in order for such attacks to be effective, one needs the media to join the fest. Rockefeller didn’t seem to doubt that they had the media on their side. He wrote that news organizations are (taking over from Ed) ” anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton Administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage.”

In other words: go after opponents / critics. He added in memos that those involved shouldn’t try to get into the details of the plan in public. Why? Because the plan wasn’t exactly bulletproof and they knew it. Abortion? “Do not engage on this topic.”

Although we now know what was said in some memos, the Clintons are hiding the bulk of them and refusing to let the public know what they thought and said back in 1993. It would be interesting to see what Hillary and Bill Clinton themselves had to say about the tactics, and about how to push this plan through.

Now, I have to say that I think that most presidents act like this and that I, therefore, can’t be too shocked. I think it’s all part of politics… to a degree that is. There are limits. Bush has been blasted by friends and foes for politicizing the office - which he has most certainly done - but as Ed points out,  the Clintons did the same thing with regards to health care reform. Instead of fighting this battle from the White House, they wanted to work with the DNC which would have to do most of the dirty work for them and which would handle the PR, basically, for the plan.

You can’t politicize an issue much more than that.

Also important to note is that the Clintons like to say that the Republicans politicized everything, tried to destroy individuals and that they only did what was necessary to fight back. These memos clearly show that this was not the case: some of the memos were written only two weeks after Clinton’s inauguration. 

We’ll have to hope that organizations like Judicial Watch will be able to get their hands on more memos if we want to know what truly went on in the early weeks of the Clinton presidency, and how they planned to push through their plans, but these memos reveal that, even shortly after they first occupied the White House, the Clinton’s knew how to play hardball, and weren’t quite willing to take prisoners.

To sum up there are two issues:

1. Politics of personal destruction seemingly embraced by the Clintons and their crew and, thus, not honest, real debate, but partisanship

2. They seem to have thought that the plans weren’t bulletproof and unprecedented and instead of admitting this / improving the plans, they basically hid these facts from the public and tried not to speak about inconvenient facts. If you want to push through health care reforms, you at least have to be 100% sure that your plan is good. The memos give one the impression that they knew their reforms weren’t all that good but that they tried to push it through nonetheless