I told the Congress I knew it was hard to change the system. Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, and Carter had all tried and failed. The effort virtually destroyed Truman’s presidency, driving his approval ratings below 30 percent and helping the Republicans gain control of the Congress. This happened because, for all our problems, most Americans had some kind of coverage, liked their doctors and hospitals, and knew we had a good system of health-care delivery. All those things were still true. Those who profited from the way health care was financed were spending huge sums to convince the Congress and the people that fixing what was wrong with the health-care system would destroy what it did right. I thought my argument was effective except for one thing: at the end of the health-care portion of the speech, I held up a pen and said I would use it to veto any bill that didn’t guarantee health insurance to all Americans. I did it because a couple of my advisors had said that people wouldn’t think I had the strength of my convictions unless I demonstrated that I wouldn’t compromise. It was an unnecessary red flag to my opponents in Congress. Politics is about compromise, and people expect Presidents to win, not posture for them. Health-care reform was the hardest of all hills to climb. I couldn’t do it alone, without compromise. As it turned out, my error didn’t matter, because Bob Dole would decide to kill any health-care reform.
In the short run, the State of the Union speech dramatically increased public support for my agenda. Newt Gingrich later said to me that after hearing the speech, he told the House Republicans that if I could persuade the congressional Democrats to deliver on my proposals, our party would be in the majority for a long time. Newt sure didn’t want that, so, like Bob Dole, he would try to keep as much from happening before the midterm elections as possible.
In the last week of January, we had a heated debate with our foreign policy team over whether to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. America had great significance to both sides in the Irish conflict. For years, ardent American supporters of the IRA had provided funds for its violent activities. Sinn Fein had a larger number of partisans here among Irish Catholics who disowned terrorism but wanted to see an end to discrimination against their coreligionists and more political autonomy, with Catholic participation, in Northern Ireland. The British and the Irish Protestants had their supporters, too, who deplored any dealings with Sinn Fein because of its ties to the IRA, and who believed that we had no business meddling in the affairs of the United Kingdom, our strongest ally. That argument had carried the day with all my predecessors, including those sympathetic to the legitimate grievances of Northern Ireland’s Catholics. Now, with the Declaration of Principles, we had to revisit it.
