After pushing through an $800 billion stimulus bill in 2009, Democrats turned their focus to a nearly year-long slog to pass the Affordable Care Act, a health law that many centrist voters did not feel met their needs at a time when the unemployment rate hovered around 10 percent. Similarly, in 1993, the Clinton White House put a huge amount of political capital into a national health law proposal that never passed Congress, at a time when the economy was still lagging in job production and wage growth.
