Our Boy Bill falls flat

Former President Bill Clinton came to Little Rock on Wednesday and asked you to marry Obamacare because you could learn to love it, and it could change.

He was the new-car salesman telling you the vehicle had factory flaws, but that there was a service department for those.

His “mend it, don’t end it” theme was reminiscent of his presidential administration’s mantra on affirmative-action programs. And we all know how universally embraced those are.

Not since he nominated Michael Dukakis for president at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 had Clinton so positively stirred.

“In closing,” he bellowed back in ’88, and the crowd roared in approval.

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I must apologize for my error. In my online-only column that Wednesday morning, I declared confidently that Clinton would deliver an exceptional and brilliant speech, making Obamacare seem positively compelling.

I predicted his best oration since the Democratic Convention last year, not his worst since the convention of ’88.

The White House must have thought the same. It kept tweeting that morning for everyone to be sure and watch online the former president’s imminent extolling of health reform.

Implicit was the idea that Clinton, as he had accomplished at the convention last year, would so adeptly and accessibly explain the essential logic of Barack Obama’s position that poll numbers would shift.

But soon, press accounts revealed that Clinton got up at his library before an invitation-only crowd and said this speech was so important that he’d actually engaged in the rarest of preparations and written his entire text.

Uh oh.

Bill’s worldly mom took him to New Orleans when he was a boy so he could behold great jazz players. As a political speaker, he’s not a sheet-music guy. He’s an improviser.

He riffs best when connecting with an audience-with the ad-lib, the aside, the impromptu note, the one thing reminding him of another.

So Clinton proceeded on Wednesday to deliver a professorially objective and even somewhat-detached assessment of Obamacare:

What we’re doing isn’t working. Our health care is too expensive, too uneven, too inaccessible, too draining on the economy. This new system will be better if we’ll settle on it, and then, as we go along, fix the things that are wrong with it. We need to correct, among other things, the small-business tax credits and the inequitable treatment of subsidies for some middle-class people. Republicans need to stop trying to kill it instead of embracing it as law and working with us to get it right.

You could see public opinion turning before your very eyes … the wrong way.

Guy in a bar: “So what did Clinton say today about Obamacare?”

Other guy in a bar: “He said it was all screwed up but we ought to do it anyway.”

The next day’s front-page headline in this newspaper was devastating.Boldly it proclaimed, “Clinton lists health-law pros, cons.”

He’s right, of course, substantively.

The less one knows about Obamacare, the more blindly frightened one is.

The more one knows about it, the more concerned one becomes about three or four perfectly fixable provisions that could make the law less burdensome, more fair, more workable, more generally positive.

But Republicans don’t want to fix it because they intend to run against it. They want only to take meaningless and cynical votes-more than three dozen now-to repeal it.

It’s the contemporary conundrum: Democrats want to make government work and they sometimes err in the process. Republicans don’t want government to work and they always revel in the errors.

The White House needed Clinton to be all-in, all-positive, all-fiery.

But he’s a global statesman now. He delivered stature, not salesmanship. And he didn’t do anybody any good.

Except Republicans.

In our polarized partisan political environment, fair-minded objectivity about one’s own efforts is pure gold for the other side.

Here’s how you sell it: Without apology, extending no quarter because none has been received.

You say that Republicans were against Social Security and Medicare, too, but those accrued to the general good without hardship or inequity.

That Obamacare needs tweaking to avoid hardship and inequity and accrue to the general good … well, I believe the phrase is “service after the sale.”

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.