In the basement of the Capitol Wednesday, House Democrats gathered to do something that would have been almost unheard of in, say, October of 2010: openly discuss the health care law they passed last March. But he House vote to repeal the law, which came courtesy of the newly-crowned Republican majority Wednesday, has turned the minority Democratic caucus into a lean, mean, health care bill-defending machine.
It was quite a change from the party of election 2010, which seemed more interested in discussing just about anything else than the landmark law that was at the center of President Obama’s domestic policy agenda and dominated political discussion for more than a year.
Reporters in the room Wednesday afternoon — part of a “bloggers row” set up by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to set the stage for the Republican-led repeal vote — noticed the change in tone on the health care law, and we asked the Democrats to explain what happened.
The simple answer, from multiple Democrats today: The law that was just a vague plan to improve the nation’s health care delivery system for much of 2010 is now beginning to go into effect, meaning that Democrats now have something tangible to defend. And thanks to the voters in November, most of the Democrats who were really wary of reform (and voted against it when it came up) are now gone.
As Brian reported earlier, the repeal vote is just the first step in a longer battle over the health care law in the House that will require the Democrats to publicly defend their legislation in a way that many seemed to be less than thrilled to do in the midterms.
Members told me Wednesday that defending their pro-repeal vote is a fight Democrats are ready for and one that, now anyway, they relish.
“I shouldn’t even admit this, but Nancy kind of put me in charge of messaging during health care and one of the things we found out very quickly was everything is affected by health care legislation uniquely,” Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) told me. “So it’s not like energy legislation or financial reform where you can say, ‘OK, we’re going to pass this and utility bills are going to go up or down x percent…there’s a uniform effect.'”
That’s all changed now that the bill is in place, Yarmuth said.
“Now we can say to virtually anybody, ‘Here’s how it will affect you,'” he said.
Yarmuth said it was easier “from a messaging standpoint” to tell that story with fewer anti-reform Democrats around, but added, “I’d rather not have lost.”
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) said wary voters weren’t willing to listen to a pro-reform argument until now. The door is finally open for the Democrats to defend their law in front of the electorate, and he said the party intends to take advantage.
“One of the things you have to understand about the political process — and being a politician, we all know it — no one believes it until it happens,” McDermott said. “I can tell you something is going to happen in three months and people say, ‘Yeah, right. A politician said that, so what.’ When it happens they stop and say, ‘Huh, I didn’t know that was in there.'”
“Our message isn’t any different than it was, but there’s traction with the public because they now see, ‘Huh, he’s telling the truth, it is happening,'” he added. “So that makes it much easier for us now, for the president to get out there and everything else.”
The health care law was structured so most of its major reforms didn’t go into effect for years following Obama’s signature on it. By McDermott’s law of politics then, the public still won’t understand what it is the Democrats did until well after Republicans have had a couple more chances to run on what they say the Democrats did. McDermott said that perhaps the strategy of rolling out the bill’s reforms wasn’t the best when it came to defending the law from opposition attacks.
“There’s a lot of things that we could say in retrospect might have made sense,” he said. “Decisions were made and I don’t think they were wrong or right, they were just what people thought it was possible to do.”
McDermott added that some Democrats who ran away from the law in hopes that they could save their political skins last year “miscalculated.”
“But that’s, you know, again Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said. “I would never tell someone how to run their campaign. I know how I ran mine.”
Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) was more willing to take on the way some of his colleagues ran last year. Braley, who entered Congress during the Democratic takeover of 2006, said his party has never been good at personalizing the debate the way he said Republicans do. Now that the reform law is slowly rolling out, they’re latching on to the individual stories of Americans affected by reform that Braley said was key to winning over the country.
“It’s frustrating to me, because I’ve maintained for the past four years that we need to do a better job of using the faces of the people who’s lives are impacted by the policies we set and telling their stories in a compelling way. That’s what convinces people that your policies are sound,” he said.
Braley said his party did a “marvelous job” distributing “reams of talking points” about reform, but were less adept at “translating those talking points into human faces and stories that Americans across the country can relate to.”
Now, with tales of constituents begging their reps to defend health care reform on the lips of nearly every Democratic lawmaker you meet on Capitol Hill, it seems Braley’s strategy is becoming the dominant one.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), the House Democrats’ new media attack dog, said as much when she stopped by to talk about defending reform from Republican attacks Wednesday.
“People, real people, have real benefits. Because children are not allowed to be dropped. Because the doughnut hole for prescription drugs are lower…so that’s why,” she said when asked why it was easier for the Democrats to fight for health care now than it was in late 2010. “You’re taking real benefits away from real people now instead of hypothetically, which is mostly what we were talking about during the debate about what might have been but could be.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said the public is more open to that kind of message these days than it was in the midst of the reform legislation fight last spring. But she rejected the idea that it’s easier for pro-reform Democrats now that they’re stuck on the defensive in the House minority.
“What are you crazy? I want to have a majority,” she said. “Agree or disagree, it’s being able to set the agenda.”
For her part, Pelosi said the real difference between now and back during the debate before the law was passed is the turf where the war will be fought. The Senate is still in Democratic hands, meaning that whatever the House Republicans decide to do with their majority when it comes to the reform law, the result will likely be a rhetorical victory only. So that means the attention will be on the House, instead of on the waffling in the Senate like last time.
“It’s easier when it’s just the House,” Pelosi said. “We’re responsible for ourselves [this time]. Last year it was what was going on in the Senate from one to the next and all the rest.”
