Sen. Grassley at eye of healthcare storm

As the senators filed out of the Oval Office after a meeting on healthcare legislation, President Obama pulled aside Sen. Charles Grassley for a brief one-on-one.

Obama didn’t mention the Twitter messages the Iowa Republican had fired off the previous Sunday morning, railing against Obama’s pre-recorded radio address that was delivered while the president was enjoying a night out overseas. “Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare,’ ” the senator wrote from the living room of his Iowa grain farm. “When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.”

You’re proving to be one tough man to convert, Obama told Grassley. But the healthcare legislation moving through Congress represents history in the making, he told the 75-year-old lawmaker. “And he wanted me to be a part of it,” Grassley said.

Winning over the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking minority member would represent a major coup for Democrats and a rare defection from the GOP party line for Grassley, a populist at heart but a loyal Republican according to his voting record.

The activist legislator in Grassley would like to affix his name to what he calls “the biggest bill of my career,” and most voters in his increasingly Democratic state would presumably applaud him for it. For months, he has sought bipartisan consensus on healthcare reform with his old friend and longtime collaborator, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). Grassley has emerged as a charter member of a Senate group that calls itself the Coalition of the Willing, four Republicans and three Democrats seeking common ground.

But his conservative side is struggling to abide core Obama goals, like a government-run coverage option that would compete with private insurance. “Finally aftr 6hrs got to a really intrestin discussion in our Rdtable; public option (backdoor to Canada health system) Scares me,” Grassley reported via Twitter from a May 14 finance session.

Most Iowa adults -- 56% -- support a government option, according to a Des Moines Register Iowa Poll completed April 1. But Grassley’s self-preservation instincts may be warning him to steer clear.

He is intrigued by a proposal from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), another coalition member, to create insurance pools modeled after rural cooperatives, as an alternative to a government plan. But Grassley’s Senate colleagues worry that he has become preoccupied by the distant but unfamiliar threat of a primary challenge in 2010, when he will seek a sixth term.

Not even Grassley can tell where he eventually will end up, but he is making the most of the attention he is receiving from the White House. Over lunch with Obama in May, the senator complained that certain Environmental Protection Agency pollution policies were harming Iowa farmers. He has since met with several senior White House officials and is negotiating a visit to his state by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

And he has thrown himself into the reform debate. Grassley’s 2009 schedule shows 87 sessions with constituents, 58 Senate meetings, 10 speeches and nine committee hearings, all exploring different ways to expand coverage and make healthcare more efficient.

Despite the series of barbed Twitter messages, Grassley said that he likes Obama. During the 2008 campaign, Iowa’s most durable politician marveled as the insurgent Democrat opened offices in every corner of the state and reached beyond traditional Democratic caucusgoers. When Obama won Iowa on Jan. 3, 2008, he did so by building a version of the broad political coalition that has lifted Grassley to five easy Senate victories.

Another lingering effect of the Iowa caucuses is the state’s strong support for healthcare reform, the main point of contention in the long presidential-primary battle among Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards.

“It’s a weird problem for Grassley,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. Iowans “were exposed to the dialogue for a year and are really engaged in the debate.”

Support for a government option is especially strong among younger Iowans, said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., the firm that conducted the Des Moines Register survey. Only in the 65-plus age group does opposition outweigh support for a public plan, Selzer said.

Grassley says that he views Obama as an honest broker in the reform debate, and that he shares the president’s goal of a broad bipartisan consensus. “I spent an hour with President Obama yesterday,” Grassley told a group of visiting Des Moines business leaders at a breakfast one morning. “He wants to get it done yesterday, and that’s about the only thing that’s inflexible about President Obama. On the issues that are key, he is willing to look at compromises.”

Grassley was elected to the Senate in 1980 and gained attention for his crusading approach to government oversight. This month, he launched an inquiry into Obama’s firing of the inspector general of Americorps, to determine whether the move was politically motivated. When he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he helped to secure two of President George W. Bush’s major legislative accomplishments: the 2001 tax-cut package and the Medicare drug benefit. But Grassley voted with Democrats in 2007 to expand health coverage for low-income children.

Fiscal conservatives have long lamented what they see as Grassley’s affection for “pork barrel” spending, but the senator sparked outrage among evangelicals when he launched an investigation in November 2007 into the finances of six prominent ministers.

And Iowa conservatives lit up talk-radio phone lines when the senator gave a flip response soon after the Iowa Supreme Court’s April 3 decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

“You better ask me in a month, after I’ve had a chance to think,” Grassley told a local reporter. He said that he had long opposed gay marriage but that the damage was done.

The Register poll placed his job approval rating at 66% of Iowa adults, compared with 64% for Obama. He routinely trounces general-election opponents at least 2-to-1, and has drawn only write-in candidates in GOP primaries.

“He strides the political landscape like a colossus,” said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science professor. “He marches to the beat pretty much of his own drummer, and Iowans tend to like that.”

But Goldford added, “He’s a guy who tends to think he’s not just there to service the constituency, but to legislate. People like that can get caught in the middle.”