Obama’s Style

I’m starting to get more and more excited for the Feb. 25th Health Care Summit. It will inevitably be a fascinating look into President Obama’s political style. Mark Schmitt articulated that style over two years ago:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists — it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands — put ‘em on a committee.

Andrew Sullivan called this the “Long Game” – describing how Obama’s political opponents, from Hillary Clinton to John McCain to Congressional Republicans, play and are playing a short game of 24-hour news cycle victories while Obama slowly backs them into a corner to enact lasting, long-term victories. I have no doubt that if Scott Brown hadn’t won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat a few weeks ago, Obama would have signed health care reform legislation and we would be reading many articles with themes similar to Sullivan’s.

That style, however, is declared a failure with Brown’s victory giving Republicans 41 Senators, enough to sustain a filibuster and block that signature piece of legislation – Health Care Reform. But, that legislation is not dead, and President Obama does want to give it an extra shove of momentum. That momentum could come from the Feb. 25th health care Summit, where Obama, Democratic leaders, and Republican leaders will publicly discuss how to proceed on health care reform. As Jonathan Chait says:

Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality.

The hope is that this summit will give Democrats enough political breathing room (read: spine) to force the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of HCR and the Senate to fix some problems with their bill through reconciliation. If that happens, Obama will have his victory. As Sullivan would say, “meep, meep“.