How Rep. Jim Cooper became a fighter—and a target—in the health care wars

It was Sept. 27, 1993, and Congressman Jim Cooper stood anxiously in the White House—not the tour-guided White House, but the family quarters upstairs. He was on tap to give a speech to the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters, and though it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of history, he was fretting that he would not make his plane. His host, a fellow Southerner and Rhodes scholar, would not let him leave.

"Mr. President, I'm going to miss my flight," Cooper said.

"I want you to stay," President Bill Clinton replied. "I'll make the speech for you over the telephone."

What? The sitting POTUS—the most powerful man in the free world—would pinch-hit as dinner speaker for an assemblage of local broadcasters? That didn't even happen when Martin Sheen was president. And yet, when his turn at the podium arrived, Cooper dialed TAB officials from Washington to say there had been a last-minute change of plans. He turned over the line to his host.

"He got on the phone, and the broadcasters will tell you it was probably their best meeting ever," Cooper recalls. "Even though there wasn't a physical speaker present. The president of the United States spent 15 or 20 minutes chitchatting on the telephone."

So why would a sitting president agree to be Plan B for a junior lawmaker's keynote speech? It all had to do with the elephant in the room—the subject Cooper's host went to great pains not to mention.

That was health care, a key issue for the Clinton administration as it devised a plan for universal coverage behind closed doors. At stake was nothing less than Clinton's legacy. Yet during their meeting, Cooper says, the president never brought it up.

Clinton's reticence was hardly lack of nerve. At the same time the commander-in-chief was wooing the rural Tennessee Democrat—asking him to go golfing, to go jogging on the Mall, to hang out in his beyond-restricted inner sanctum—his first lady had set up a war room to pick off opponents and obstacles to the administration's health care initiative. A particular thorn in Hillary Rodham Clinton's side was an alternative centrist bill, then gaining traction on both sides of the aisle. Unlike the Clinton plan, it carried little political baggage, hadn't polarized legislators, and didn't trip the "socialized medicine!" scare alarm. That made it dangerous.

Its sponsor was Jim Cooper.

And so Cooper found himself the subject of a good-cop-bad-cop hustle, being played out at the highest political level by masters of civic bloodsport. Suddenly, an ambitious junior lawmaker was up off the backbench and taking a starting position opposite the Clinton White House in the biggest game in town.

At the time, Clinton's popular presidency was riding a groundswell of positive public opinion. His youthful optimism was infectious. Yet his administration was plagued by the absence of a mandate, and the many splinter factions on the Hill seemed stalemated—even Democrats. When first lady Hillary Clinton and health czar Ira Magaziner met to concoct policy in the insular White House, away from the eyes of Congress, there was the very real sense that those factions couldn't be bridged, a firsthand observer tells the Scene.

"[During the Clinton administration] we didn't bring contradictory factions in Congress together, even among the Democrats," says Dr. Atul Gawande, a cancer surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital who was a health care policy advisor for the Clinton administration at that time (and is also a former health policy advisor for Cooper). "And that really hurt us." By "hurt," Gawande means that the Clinton White House strategy was essentially responsible for scuttling reform.

But the political divide ruined any chance of a Cooper victory as well. Young, Oxford-educated, aloof and cerebral, Cooper had more in common with Republicans on issues regarding government intervention in the marketplace. At a time when Democratic unity was schismatic at best, there was little hope for the Coopers in the House finding common ground with someone like John Dingell, then chairman of the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce. A New Deal Democrat of the back-slapping union-hall school, Dingell embodied the belief that government is the shepherd watching over its flock, the American people.

Eventually, the game would go down as a loss for almost every player concerned—including the millions of Americans who watched the promise of health care coverage evaporate in puffs of hot air. Now, 15 years later, the battle for health care is being fought once more—and in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it's déjà vu all over again.

As before, the Democrats are one beast with two heads. And for those familiar with the adversarial forces that swirled around the health care debate during the last Democratic presidency, that's not the only thing that hasn't changed. The health and insurance industries, along with conservative talk radio and anti-tax organizations, are ginning up Big Government paranoia just as they did before.

But an unexpected player is emerging in the latest round of the health care wars—the lawmaker who Hillary Clinton tried, with some efficiency, to sideline during the last one.