Howard Dean Call To Kill Health Bill Is 'Childish': Ex-DNC Head Fowler

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler has never been one to mince words.

And the South Carolina professor and businessman more than lived up to his reputation today when NPR asked for his take on calls by some from the party's left wing - and from fellow former DNC chairman Howard Dean - to kill the health care bill still being debated in the Senate.

"It's childish - and I'm as liberal as anybody," said Fowler, who has been following the intra-party imbroglio from Minnesota, where he's scheduled to have knee replacement surgery Friday at Rochester's Mayo Clinic.

"The people who will benefit most from defeating this health care bill will be Republicans," Fowler says. "And the people who will suffer the most are the people we liberals claim to represent and care more about than anybody else."

Don't get him wrong - the bill isn't perfect, he says. And it doesn't include provisions he personally supports, including a public insurance option and one that would allow people ages 55 and older to buy Medicare insurance. But if passed, he says, the legislation would provide a foundation on which improvements could be built in the future.

The current bill would extend coverage to 30 million Americans who have none today, prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on gender or pre-existing conditions, or from dropping it when policy-holders need it, says Sarah Bianchi, a health care adviser for the Clinton administration Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Bianchi, now at Eton Park Capital Management, says that passage of the health care plan being debated would be the biggest public policy accomplishment of her lifetime.

Fowler referred to assertions by some liberal writers and bloggers that scuttling the bill would give Democrats will have ample opportunity next year to build a better piece of legislation as "bull$#%&."

"We have seen that it's taken 14 years to get from Clinton to Obama - and this year we have had reasonably good political circumstance," Fowler said. "And the effort has taken an entire year."

 

"To somehow think that to capriciously turn it down with the expectation that you're going to get something better next year is not just naive, it's stupid."

Much of the political left's ire has been focused on Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Democrat who threatened to filibuster the bill if it contained either of those provisions.

Fowler shares their distaste for Lieberman but says that he believes they are now in league with him.

"I don't mean to pour gasoline on the fire, but I think it's immature," Fowler says of the left's saber rattling. "It's like doing a favor for your enemy, and it makes no sense to me."

That being said, Fowler sees the intra-party bickering as a "temporary irritant" that won't derail President Obama's current initiative.