Healthcare Reform Endgame 2: Summit Edition

The President's health care reform summit is over, and not a lot happened. That is a victory for Republicans, many of whom were terrified in advance, and a defeat for President Obama, who apparently thought he could accomplish something there.

The Republicans came ready to play, and play they did. Any complex piece of legislation is likely to have a lot of problems embedded in it, and the House and Senate healthcare bills, along with the President's pseudo-bill, are collectively one grand mess. Usually this sort of thing doesn't matter, as all the details with all their devils are discussed behind closed doors. The President's summit gave the Republicans a six hour forum to open up the Senate bill (the only one that has a chance of passing) to public inspection, and they were well-prepared to do so. The Republicans were careful to be scrupulously respectful of the President. It was the President who grew a bit testy as he realized that he couldn't control the conversation. It is to his credit that the result was largely a wash, but he needed a clean win.

Why did the Administration engineer this summit? That was largely, I think, because of the President's success when he recently appeared before the Congressional Republicans. But at that event, the President stood at a podium. Such things matter. The American Presidency is an awesome spectacle. Anyone standing has an advantage over a crowd that is sitting.

The President thought he could make that same mojo work a second time, but at the summit he was sitting down at a square set of tables. It is hard to imagine our most successful Presidents doing that. It reduces the preeminent advantage of the President to that on one among many. That's true even if the President gets one third of the speaking time. President Obama said that his remarks at the opening didn't count against his time because "I'm the President." That was light-hearted, but it was also revealing. He didn't realize how much he had surrendered by the setting.

The most charitable view of what the President was trying to accomplish at the summit is this: he didn't expect to bring any Republicans over to his side, and he didn't expect to sway public opinion. He was only trying to give wavering House Democrats something they could use. They can say: we bent over backwards to bring the Republicans on board and the bastards wouldn't budge. That's why I had to vote for the detestable Senate bill and go along with the reconciliation strategy.

Maybe that will help. But no one thinks that Speaker Pelosi has the votes yet to pass the Senate bill. Short of a change in public opinion, can she get them? I am guessing that very few Americans watched the summit. The Democrats have been playing this song for a year now, and no one is dancing. The electorate wants the government to be concentrating on the economy and jobs, and all the Democrats want to talk about is health insurance.

The only thing left is to see if the Democrats can really "Rahm-through" a health care bill. If they can, that will be bad for them. Maybe Americans will come to love their legislation when it is enacted, but it is designed not to make much difference for years. It might not be any more loveable this November. If they can't, they will be just as unpopular among the majority that opposes their health care adventure, and their own base will be existentially dispirited. Oh, and they will have frittered away a year of Democratic dominion in the legislative and executive branches.

Comments

[Brian Rush]

"The President's health care reform summit is over, and not a lot happened. That is a victory for Republicans, many of whom were terrified in advance, and a defeat for President Obama, who apparently thought he could accomplish something there."

He did accomplish something, and this is a victory for the presidet, not for Republicans. If you think he put on the summit for the reasons he said he did -- to encourage bipartisan cooperation and pass a truly consensus health care bill -- either you're hopelessly naive or you think he is. This was an opportunity for the president to air the fact that the Republicans don't want serious health care reform. They cooperated completely. Senator Alexander stated straight up that he doesn't believe the government can or should enact comprehensive reform of the system. The other Republicans said the same thing in different words.

What this will do is to deflect any criticism when the Democrats pass their version of health care reform without a single Republican vote. Since President Obama is NOT hopelessly naive, he always knew that it would come in the end to that. He set up the Republicans to help him show the country why.

[William]

If you have to pay bribes to get the votes you need, it can't be good legislation. The American people realize that and are overwhelmingly opposed to "comprehensive" reform as it's being presented in any of the Democrats plans.

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood . . ."
- James Madison

[KB]

Brian: Thanks for the comment. You accuse me of being naive because I believe the President wasn't lying when he said what the health care summit was all about. I assure you, and I am not naive about the President's honesty.

Your view of the outcome of the summit is contradicted by nearly every major news outlet. See John Dickerson's analysis at Slate.com. Dickerson thinks, rightly, that the President won and the Republicans won because both looked reasonable. That means that the Democrats lost.

William: I disagree that "If you have to pay bribes to get the votes you need, it can't be good legislation". If by "bribes" you mean trading benefits for votes, that's called logrolling, and it's how the Congress has always worked.

But I agree with the rest of your comment. The people know well enough what this legislation is about, and they're against it.

[William]

KB,

I understand logrolling but I do feel that in order to pass these particular bills the logs must have been cut from Sequoia trees and reached a level that may appropriately be described as bribes.

[KB]

William: I don't think we disagree on anything important here. I would just emphasize that the fact that members of Congress are being offered something for their vote is not in itself suspect, so long as the offer is something that they can legitimately bargain for. The question here is whether the bargains were fair or not. The fact that the deal made with what's his name from Nebraska was withdrawn indicates otherwise.

[William]

KB,

Agreed, it certainly appears that some of the "logs" rolled in this case might not even pass Constitutional muster.