We don't wanna know

Mark Schmitt suggests that the Dem candidates should offer a whole lot fewer details.

Eight years ago, I worked on Senator Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. Mr. Bradley issued a detailed health plan, which got lost in a squabble with Vice President Al Gore over technical questions like whether the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program could provide services comparable to Medicaid.

Fighting over such minutiae served neither the Bradley candidacy nor the cause of universal health care. Yet here we go again, picking apart Barack Obama’s health plan, John Edwards’s poverty plan, Bill Richardson’s plan on climate change.

The explanation for these plans is that voters deserve to know what a candidate would do if elected president. But highly detailed plans don’t tell us that. Nor does the ability to assign some staffers to produce a plan indicate the skills necessary to serve as president. The plans put forward in the primaries are long forgotten by Inauguration Day.

That’s what happened after the Democratic primary-campaign battle over health plans in 1992. Bob Kerrey moved first, taking the left-wing position of support for a single-payer system. Paul Tsongas embraced the centrist, technocratic fix known as managed competition. Under pressure to produce a plan, Bill Clinton half-heartedly wrote one based on the “pay or play” idea, which would require employers either to cover all their workers or pay a tax.

But when Mr. Clinton, as president, unveiled his actual health plan more than a year later, it looked a lot like Mr. Tsongas’s. Meanwhile, Mr. Kerrey forgot his previous embrace of single-payer and became a critic from the right of President Clinton’s Tsongas-like plan. This isn’t evidence that politicians are deceitful or willfully break their promises. They were promises that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?

Democratic primary voters are infatuated with the idea of plans, not the plans themselves. We like to think that we vote based on our rational analysis of issues and ideas, not on such tawdry matters as personality. So we insist that candidates produce plans to show that they are as serious as we like to think we are. Voters mistakenly use the level of detail in a plan as a clue to the candidate’s level of commitment to solving a problem. But what we really need are clues to character.

Democrats should just state their principles, explain their reasoning, and describe their basic goals for health care or poverty. In a recent Democratic debate, Hillary Rodham Clinton almost did. “The most important thing is not the plan,” she said. “We’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” What is crucial, she added, is that “you’ve got to have the political will.”

I don't disagree with him; he's certainly got the black & blue marks from working on the Bradley campaign to prove his experience. But one of the things that actually has Democratic voters excited about the primaries this early is the very existence of ideas. The Republican candidates have not a one, the Dem candidates are brim full of them.

Unfortunately, having "principles" is great, but the devil's always in the details and we want something more than ideas to back up those principles. Principles without a plan just aren't very credible. It's going to be a tough balancing act, particularly on health care. Provide enough details to show they're serious without showing anything that will come back to haunt them later. For instance, John Edwards has been forthright in saying that if we want to fix the health care crisis in this country we need to show how we'll pay for it. True enough. But that will be easily translated as raising taxes by whatever sot the Republicans nominate. And while I think most Americans basically understand that if we want universal health care it's going to mean generating income to pay for it, they viscerally respond to "He wants to raise your taxes!" That's assuming he survives the primaries in which his fellow candidates will point to him and exclaim, "He can't win against Republicans -- they'll just label him a 'tax and spend liberal.'"

It's stupid. It's politics.