Collective Conscious

Play­ing back through the recent months of the health-​​care debate and the ensu­ing leg­isla­tive spec­ta­cle, I have to ask myself: would Hillary Clin­ton have made a bet­ter leader through­out it all? Would she, for­mer first lady and Sen­ate vet­eran, have been able to cor­ral the increas­ingly intran­si­gent leg­is­la­tors into accept­ing a more lib­eral health­care bill on a shorter timetable?

Hillary would have been far more likely to take an active, aggres­sive role through­out the entire process. She would have been able to take advan­tage of more per­sonal rela­tion­ships with key Sen­a­tors, thanks to her time in the White House and in the upper cham­ber itself. She would have more appre­ci­a­tion for the par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cul­ties of health­care leg­is­la­tion, hav­ing attempted it once her­self already.

But I don’t think these char­ac­ter­is­tics would have been able to achieve any more than was was accom­plished through Obama’s appar­ent benign neglect of the leg­isla­tive body. Whereas Hillary may have exposed her­self to the same sort of frus­tra­tion and defeat suf­fered in 1993, Obama’s sup­posed fail­ures, when cast in the light of his sheer dis­tance from the Sen­ate, have served per­haps a more use­ful pur­pose than direct engage­ment and a mar­ginal improve­ment of this par­tic­u­lar bill might have. Obama’s refusal to join the fray, above all things, has per­haps led to the great­est pub­lic aware­ness of the upper chamber’s dys­func­tions than Bill and Hillary’s inabil­ity to achieve results did in their early years.

For this, I am grate­ful; I think that res­o­lu­tion of this issue is key to estab­lish­ing a more lib­eral mode of gov­ern­ment through­out this new decade. For Obama’s abil­ity to take on the health­care issue (Hillary, I fear, would have been unable to even broach the sub­ject), I am also grate­ful. While Hillary may have had the expe­ri­ence to per­form, I think Obama’s approach has proven that he under­stands the long game of pol­i­tics more than any other Pres­i­dent in quite some time.