WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton yesterday rode in with an 11th-hour attempt to save the sputtering Senate health-care bill, as liberal backlash threatened to torpedo President Obama’s top domestic priority.
Clinton spoke out with the clock set to strike on Obama’s self-imposed Christmas deadline for the Senate passing a bill.
The White House aggressively took to TV to push back against liberal outrage — while struggling, without success, to get the lone Democratic Senate holdout, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, on board.
Clinton — who saw his own attempt at a health-care overhaul crash on the shoals of Congress in 1994 — wrote an open letter saying it would be a “colossal blunder” to let the nearly $1 trillion plan die.
“Does the bill read exactly how I would write it? No. Does it contain everything everyone wants? No,” he wrote. “But America can’t afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
“Take it from someone who knows: These chances don’t come around every day. Allowing this effort to fall short now would be a colossal blunder.”
His last-ditch appeal came as the fight became a Democrat-on-Democrat brawl, with liberals — including Andy Stern, head of the giant labor union SEIU, a key White House ally — pouncing on Obama for letting the legislation lose elements like government-run health care.
The AFL-CIO also put out a statement saying the bill was “hijacked” and is now “inadequate.”
The White House’s liberal base is furious over the lack of a “public option.”
But the president is also trying to win over pro-life centrist Nelson (D-Neb.), who is concerned that the language in the latest proposals doesn’t satisfy his concern about abortion subsidies and overall costs.
Nelson also thinks the bill won’t pass by Christmas. With the GOP united in opposition, the Senate Dems need all 60 members of their caucus to vote in favor of moving the bill forward.
Meanwhile, Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, took the unusual step of denying a blogosphere rumor that the administration wants to retaliate against Nelson by closing an air base in Nebraska.
And top administration officials fired back at former Democratic National Committee leader Howard Dean, who is urging the Senate to kill the bill because it does not provide a government-run health care plan to compete with private insurers.
White House political strategist David Axelrod said Dean’s concerns about the bill are “predicated on a bunch of erroneous conclusions.”
“To defeat a bill that will bend the curve on this inexorable rise in health-care costs is insane,” he said.