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Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans' views on health care reform, it found that most people still back the individual components of Obama's effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself - the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind - has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since - you guessed it - the Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans that they can't trust government with their health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince...
Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it's also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway. That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only...
...mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government's role - Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans' health care system, the Children's Health Insurance Program, even George W. Bush's prescription-drug plan - has proved popular. But when problems fester year after year and public trust in government falls lower and lower, strange and convulsive things can happen. They happened when Perot jolted the political system in 1992, and we may well see them again soon. Perhaps if the two parties can't come together to solve difficult problems out of a sense of responsibility, they...
Obama should not be afraid to drop the 4,500 pages of Democratic health legislation. He should commit to work in an open, bipartisan manner on new legislation that would earn public support both for its substance and through the transparent process by which it is crafted. (See pictures of Obama's first year in the White House...
Similarly, when I was Speaker, President Clinton and I had a series of very tough negotiations, but in the end we accomplished welfare reform, Medicare reform, the first tax cuts in 16 years and the first four consecutive balanced budgets (reducing the public debt by $450 billion) since the 1920s. The public fights were often intense, but the willingness to keep talking and working together led to a number of historic achievements that both Clinton and the congressional Republicans could claim credit for. (See pictures of Gingrich's career...