Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max Months before the 2012 election, a top official in the Obama administration confidently boasted to me that MITT ROMNEY would be the last GOP presidential candidate to run on a platform of repealing and replacing Obamacare. He was wrong. But only by an election cycle or two. This past week was the 12th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act being signed into law. And what was notable was, frankly, how un-notable it was. Health care reform groups and Democratic politicians offered statementsin praise of the moment. Virtually no Republicans put out calls for the law to be wiped from the books. Obamacare, in short, has become so embedded in our political ecosystem as to make it immovable; and all with one year to go before its actual bar mitzvah. As they reflect back on the history of the law with the benefit of some hindsight, Democrats say there are lessons to apply to today’s legislative debates. Chief among them: Getting to yes is almost always preferable to the pursuit of the ideological ideal. This past week, Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) has let out wordthat he is ready to re-engage on negotiations on President JOE BIDEN’ s domestic agenda formerly known as “Build Back Better.” But it won’t look remotely like the talks from last summer and fall. Gone is the promise of dramatically expanding the social safety net; or of extending a now-expired boosted child tax credit that had dramatically reduced childhood poverty; or of implementing the measures that were designed to build off the insurance gains from Obamacare itself. It’s still unclear if the expansions of Obamacare in the American Rescue Plan , which are set to expire at the end of the year, will be extended. In its place will likely be a package of historic investments in climate change, additional domestic energy production, prescription drug reform, tax hikes on corporations, and devoting the leftover revenues raised from it all to reducing the deficit. To say this is not what progressive imagined would be an understatement. But Obamacare wasn’t exactly what they wanted either. “It was a half measure,” is how HOWARD DEAN, the former Vermont governor and DNC Chair put it to me recently. Dean’s main gripes with the bill were that it did too little to control costs, made it too easy for consortiums and virtual health care monopolies to form and, relatedly, did not include an expansion of government subsidized insurance (either through Medicare or the public option). At one point, during its construction, he called for the Senate to “kill” its bill and start over procedurally. It sent shockwaves through Democratic circles at the time. “Looking back on it now,” Dean told me, “I’m glad they didn’t.” The outcome was not the bill he wanted. Indeed, he called it a “retreat.” But it was a demonstrably better place to build from than the status quo — and, as Huffpost’s JONATHAN COHN notes, there are plenty of ways such building could get done. “We missed an opportunity but we made some progress,” Dean said. “I guess that is the best way to say it.” Congressional Democrats seem inclined to make “some progress” now too. Progressive leadership has hinted that it welcomes Manchin’s return to the negotiating table and is willing to meet his demands, at least in the abstract. The White House, for its part, has been cagey about just how involved they currently are and declined to comment for this piece. But they’re tonally at a far different place than last winter, when they sent out a scorching denunciation of Manchin for killing the original bill. The fact that they’re not commenting on Manchin’s overtures suggests they view them as real. Could it be a redux of Obamacare? On a substantive level, no. The climate investments in whatever final product may end up being produced will likely be extraordinary. But it doesn’t seem poised to constitute the policy lift that reforming the nation’s health care system was in 2010. As a matter of procedure, however, there are some obvious parallels between now and then. “We were clear all along that at some point you have to pivot from working on your vision while keeping the entire enterprise afloat,” said RICHARD KIRSCH, who at the time served as the national campaign manager for the pro-reform group Health Care for America Now. “We wanted to keep the political will to strengthen it and when the will wasn’t there we pivoted to try and get it passed.” The importance, Kirsch emphasized, was progress not purity. “It’s ok to be in left field but you want to be sure you’re on the field,” he explained. TEXT US — Are you SANDRA FORD, special assistant to the president for public health and science? We want to hear from you (we’ll keep you anonymous). Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal/Wickr/WhatsApp Alex at 8183240098 or Max at 7143455427.
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