Winning the White House? History's Against Them.

Insurance is averaging out over the good times and the bad, providing a floor when bad things happen to good people. Most Americans want the government to step in when working people need help in tough times.

In a battle between tax cuts and insurance, insurance wins. The 1995 GOP budget was defeated because Americans believed that it took away the floor by stripping money from Medicare and other universal programs that provide security. Clinton could champion the "services that people need," while the Republicans appeared insensitive, interested only in how much they could cut taxes without raising the deficit.

On the other hand, welfare is redistribution, a one-way transfer of assets from the haves to the have-nots. Most Americans do not equate inequality with injustice and will not sacrifice their own opportunities to help those who do not help themselves. In a battle between tax cuts and welfare, welfare loses, particularly when it does not acknowledge the importance of work.

· Build floors, not ceilings.

Americans (and people almost everywhere, according to polls) believe that a good society has floors below which no one should go, but they don't support ceilings -- limits on how much anyone can have.

Republican opponents of universal programs such as health care often charge that these plans are "one size fits all." This phrase brilliantly evokes worries about ceilings, limiting choices available to the haves to give to the have-nots. The Clinton health-care proposal was defeated in part because its opponents convinced the well-insured that they would be limited to getting what everyone else got.

Voters want government insurance for those in need, not a government-run medical system for all. Any new program premised on the idea that government can run a health system more inexpensively -- or better -- than the private sector can will encounter widespread resistance. Yet Americans do want the government to provide a floor. In the latest CBS-New York Times survey, 64 percent said the government should guarantee health insurance, and 84 percent wanted insurance for children lacking it in particular. In the same survey, a plurality -- 44 percent -- said that government was worse than private companies at providing coverage.

Democrats should try to provide insurance for the uninsured without limiting choices for those who have insurance. Beefing up the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers insurance for working people and their children, would be smart. Bush has proposed limiting the budget for this program. Expanding it -- and daring the president to veto it -- is the right way to confront Republicans.

So far the Democrats have -- at least on domestic issues -- been restrained, moderate and mostly harmonious. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been more Baltimore than Berkeley. The party has passed its "first 100 hours" agenda. From here on, Democrats face the larger challenge of using their power on the Hill to help their 2008 presidential nominee. That means crafting initiatives that conspicuously address the concerns of middle- and working-class families and changing Bush vetoes into reasons to turn his party out of the White House.