WASHINGTON — With his long-promised veto Wednesday of a bill to expand health insurance for children, President Bush has ignited an ideological battle that could well rage on into next year's presidential campaign.
At bottom, the issue is whether government should take the lead in extending healthcare benefits to uninsured children -- mostly in low-income families but some in middle-class ones -- or whether the task should be left primarily to the private sector.
The State Children's Health Insurance Program, managed by states within federal guidelines, also has become entangled in Bush's late-inning effort to help the GOP recapture its image of fiscal restraint after six years of budget deficits and increased federal spending.
Both Democrats and Republicans seem convinced that they will gain more from confrontation than from compromise. Democrats will try to override Bush's veto in two weeks with a vote requiring a two-thirds majority. The effort is likely to fall short, even though the bill had significant Republican support.
If the veto stands, Democrats said, they will repass the measure without significant changes and send it back to the White House. That would force the GOP to go on record again as opposing expansion of a program that currently serves about 6 million children, including about 800,000 in California. An estimated 9 million children remain uninsured nationwide, and the number has been rising as employers cut back coverage.
Bush on Wednesday cast the issue in terms of those who want to help the poor and those who want to increase the size and cost of government.
"The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children, and the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage," he told a crowd of business leaders in Lancaster, Pa. "And that's where the philosophical divide comes in."
On the Democratic side, the line of attack was laid down by Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee. "This has got to be up there with motherhood and apple pie. This is Tiny Tim. And who is against Tiny Tim? The only person in all of literature was Ebenezer Scrooge," he said, referring to the crippled boy and hardhearted man in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
Cooper, a fiscal conservative who voted against a more expansive version of the bill this summer, said Bush "is playing into Democratic hands. Either the program will get passed and he'll look like Ebenezer Scrooge, or we won't override the veto and he still looks like Ebenezer Scrooge."
