Hillarycare 17 years later

Here’s a good analysis of Hillary care of 1992 (as it was known by its detractors) written in 2007. I was looking through it to see what the reasons were that it went down. The author, Paul Starr, was an insider, having been brought into the process by Ira Magaziner. He sites:

• right-wing misrepresentations
  
• malicious personal attacks on Hillary
  
• reporters and the public thought that Bill Clinton had handed over the policy to Hillary
  
• false charges
  
• misunderstanding the politics behind the plan
  
• distrust of the Washington bureaucracy
  
• no positive consensus about what to do among Democrats
  
• change in priorities by President Clinton
  
• charges of heresy from the Left and Right alike
  
• accusations of secrecy (30 working groups)
  
• began with a huge program that could be bargained away by layers
  
• lurid fears from talk radio that the federal government would control every detail of medical care

It all sounds quite familiar given what we've been going through since Obama tried to ram jam the mega-health bill through in August. Apparently, some of his supporters are too young (or too old) to remember that many of us remember 1992!

But in that entire list, which could be ripped right out of a report from Katie Couric this evening, there's not a single charge of racism. Odd isn't it? I'm sure personal animus toward Mrs. Clinton was part of it, particularly since she wasn't elected and according to Starr her role was misunderstood, but apparently no one said the conservatives dislike for her plan was based on her race. Yet faced with many of the same arguments, and an even bigger, more complicated and confusing plan/bill, now we're racists.