I've been re-reading Haynes Johnson and David Broder's post-mortem on Clinton's health care reform effort, "The System."
So much of what is happening now is an echo of that time. Some passages that stood out:
p. 11:
"Much more than political gamesmanship over defeating a rival's most cherished policy was at stake in Gingrich's battle plan. To Gingrich, defeating health care reform was essential to making himself the first Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives in forty hears. He planned to ride to power on the crest of a new Republican wave. Republicans would win control of Congress and then reshape the American political, social, and economic future. Killing the Clinton reform was a critical means to achieving that end. Had any part of the Clinton plan passed that Congress in any form, Gingrich and his closest conservative allies believed, their dreams for forging a militantly conservative future would 'have been cooked,' as a key Gingrich strategist later explained."
pp. 39-40:
". . . Gringrich prepared to defeat the very kind of plan now being proposed. No support would come from Gingrich and the restive Republicans he led, especially support for a President of Gingrich's own post-World War II generation who possessed, Gingrich believed, formidable political gifts with potential for becoming another FDR.
House Democrats knew they could not expect a single Republican vote. They would have to win this by themselves. So they could. They had the control, they had the votes, they had the power. The question was whether Democrats had teh unity of purpose and the urgency to act."
p. 304:
"[Gingrich] meant more than not helping. He meant doing everything possible to derail the Clinton plan. . . .
Politically, he had no interest in compromise. His pollsters and advisers were telling him that stopping the Clinton plan was teh necessary prelude to defeating the Democrats in the 1994 midterm election. As we have already seen, as early as 1991 Gingrich had concluded that thwarting Democrats on health care was the key to halting and then rolling back decades of Democratic efforts to build an encompassing social safety net -- a net that he believed was strangling the American economy, trapping millions of supposed beneficiaries in red tape and regulation, and making them more dependent on government and the democratic Party that provided the government-supplied benefits.
There would be no compromise -- at beginning or end -- with Gingrich and his forces."
p. 426:
"[T]he Washington Post's Dana Priest reported on an interview she had had the previous day with Fred Grandy, the Iowa Republican who was working toward some kind of bipartisan compromise. Grandy told her he had received new 'marching orders' from Newt Gingrich not to try to improve the bill through amendments. 'It's disappointing,' Grandy said, 'but we had a leadership that preempts policy with partisanship."