Politics Can Be A Good Thing

[SiouxPal]

The President’s Best Hope in the G.O.P.


President Obama intends to keep wooing the public to support for his health care goals in a scheduled Monday night appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Polls suggest he has had mixed results so far.

Most critical, however, is his private effort to persuade one person: Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine.

And that effort appears to be going very well.

Ms. Snowe has not endorsed either Democratic health care bill in the Senate. No Republican has.

But in an interview, she offered a surprisingly robust endorsement of Mr. Obama’s skepticism about expanding government too much, his willingness to accommodate different views and his assertion that Washington must act now after decades of failure.

Those views directly contradict the assertions of Republican leaders, who accuse Mr. Obama of pursuing a radical expansion of government, spurning dialogue and unduly rushing to enact his agenda. Ms. Snowe’s analysis of the discrepancy: she has maintained traditional Republican principles over 30 years in Washington, while her party has moved past them to the right.

“I haven’t changed as a Republican,” she said. “I think more that my party has changed.”

The significance of the Obama-Snowe relationship lies not in the prospect that the president will replicate it with many, or even any, other Republicans. To achieve his objectives, Ms. Snowe may be the only Republican he needs.

‘Budget Neutral’

In talking across the ideological divide, Mr. Obama’s greatest challenge is persuading Republicans that his quest to extend insurance to an additional 30 million Americans will not add “a dime to the deficit,” as he recently promised Congress.

“Two-thirds of the costs for covering new people will be paid for by taking waste out of the system,” Mr. Obama said in an interview at the White House. The bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, would finance most of the rest with a tax on high-cost insurance plans — which economists say may also “bend the cost curve” down by discouraging heavy health care spending.

Republican leaders scoff. But Ms. Snowe believes the Baucus bill meets Mr. Obama’s goal.

“It is budget neutral,” Ms. Snowe said, citing a Congressional Budget Office analysis that the proposal would save $49 billion over 10 years. “It does reduce the deficit.”

More starkly, Ms. Snowe dismisses the Republican characterization of Mr. Obama as a big-government liberal moving heedlessly to expand Washington’s role. “I almost sense the opposite,” Ms. Snowe said. “He’s been very realistic in his views on health care.

“I’ve gotten an impression that he would, you know, probably do less than more,” she added. His place on the ideological spectrum, she said, is “more moderate than liberal on this question.”

She uses her running conversation with the president over a government-run health insurance “public option” to illustrate the point. Her portrait of a politically supple new president diverges drastically from the dogmatic leftist described by other Republicans.

“I sensed at the outset that he might be far more flexible on that question many months ago when I had an initial discussion with him,” said Ms. Snowe, who backs a public option as a backup that would be “triggered” only if the private insurance market fails.

An Early Courtship

Mr. Obama and his team began cultivating Ms. Snowe even before he took office in January. “He’s always eliciting my views,” she said, “wondering, you know, what my concerns are.”

It paid off on economic stimulus legislation when she provided one of three Republican votes clearing the way for the $787 billion package. Independence like that helps her popularity in Obama-friendly Maine, just as bucking Mr. Obama helps conservative Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson back in Nebraska.

Ms. Snowe will get a chance in the Finance Committee this week to tailor the bill further to her specifications, which include higher premium subsidies benefiting low- and moderate-income constituents, as well as the triggered public option.

That will not make it easy for her to do what Democrats wish: to defy her party, join 59 Democrats and provide the 60th vote necessary to surmount a potential Republican filibuster.

Not only is Ms. Snowe a lifelong Republican, but her husband, John McKernan, is a former Republican governor of Maine. In the interview, she made no commitment on the health care overhaul. Yet she offered a rationale for joining Democrats this year, observing that “the time has come” to act.

“I’d like to have more Republicans on board,” she said. Does she have to have them?

“Well, no — I’m going to support the right policy,” she concluded. “People really want to get something done.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/us/politics/21caucus.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1253554234-U1oGb8oQVbM0ARjUa9HNPA