Clinton Cares

The headline threw me: "Clinton says he was wrong on healthcare bill's popularity." I mean, obviously he was wrong--trying to stiffen the spines of fearful Democrats, he said public approval would start increasing "the minute" the bill was passed.  I was just surprised to hear he was admitting it.

Turns out he's not really admitting he was flat-out wrong so much as trying to explain away what he said:

First of all, the benefits of the bill are spread out of [sic] three or four years. It takes a long time to implement. And secondly, there has been an enormous and highly effective attack on it.

The first excuse is hard to buy, since everyone understood the goodies in the bill don't come till later (an accounting trick to make the whole thing seem cheaper). The second excuse begs the question.  Before the bill passed, there had been an enormous and highly effective attack on it--that was why Dems were afraid to vote for it.  To say it'll be popular after it passes is to say that the enormous and highly effective attack on it will no longer be effective once it's a done deal.

Not satisfied, Clinton continues:

I think [Obama] was shocked at the intensity of the Republican opposition. But they learned from my first two years that, if you just say no, even though people hate it, you get rewarded for it because it discourages the Democrats and it inflames your base. So they're doing just what they did in '93 and '94. And so far it appears that they're being rewarded for it.

So people hate it when you try to stop an unpopular bill.  They hate it so much they reward you.

There's a belief on the left--some would say a fantasy--that it was the failure to pass HillaryCare that hurt the Dems in 1994.  Doesn't it seem more likely that trying to shove a massive and massively unpopular bill down the people's throats is more likely to do damage?