Health Care Summit Reaction

About two weeks ago I wrote a post in anticipation of the February 25th Health Care Summit in the context of President Obama’s political style – the “Long Game”. His style was described as that of a chess player always thinking farther ahead than his political opponents, drawing them 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”, as Mark Schmitt articulated it.

In my post I described how Democrats in Washington were going to try to use the Summit to push Health Care Reform the extra few inches it needs to get passed. Thus, the audience for the Summit was not the public as much as it was the Congressional Democrats who needed to be persuaded to fight for this legislation, and who needed to be persuaded that Republicans had no real ideas that would turn into votes.

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“.

(Whoa, I just quoted myself. A blog first. How meta!)

While we have yet to see if the Summit will be seen as a galvanizing force behind a reform bill being signed by Obama, as the bill has not passed (yet?), it seems to have done exactly what I thought it would do, and the President did just about exactly what I thought he would do. As Politico’s Glenn Thrush noted, the President was “Lots of Spock, mixed with flashes of Kirk”.

At times, he’s been an impressively dispassionate moderator and observer, repeatedly offering to consider Republicans arguments with a professorial “that’s philosophically valid point” before picking them apart.

By the end of an admittedly grueling 7 hour event, I couldn’t help but think that the President succeeded in showing the Republican’s lack of ideas as a collective. Individual Republicans, like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, showed genuine understanding of the health care debate. As a whole, however, the Republicans stuck to their talking points of “scrap the current bill” and “start over” (which is code for “kill the bill”), which made them look very bad compared to the President, and basically proved the point that Mark Schmitt, Andrew Sullivan, and others had been making about the “Obama Style”. Jonathan Chait notes:

Most of the Republicans have relied upon scripted talking points and generalized denunciations of big government and a “government takeover.” Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it’s not possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and subsidizing those who afford it. (Short answer: people would just game the system, going without insurance until they get sick.) Obama has spoken at enormous length today about why letting insurance companies sell policies across state lines would let insurers siphon out the healthy and leave the sick behind.

John Boehner, the House Majority Leader, simply repeated the GOP talking point about scrapping the 2,000 page bill and doing the easy popular stuff: “Why can’t we agree on those insurance reforms we talked about? Why can’t we agree on purchasing across state lines?” It’s like he wasn’t even there. Does he not understand what the other side is saying? Does he not care at all? It’s not that he’s provided an answer to Obama’s arguments that I disagree with. He’s just totally unable to acknowledge or engage at any level with the arguments presented. You’re debating a brick wall.

The image problem was not limited to Congressional Republicans. Most Democrats in the room not named Barack Obama or Joe Biden came off pretty poorly too. That problem was due to the structure of the event, which basically never strayed from both parties throwing talking points and speeches at each other. The Democrats would have done much better if they had simply let the President do ALL of the talking for their party, because the grand exception to all of this was, of course, Obama. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, “can he have a cigarette now?” Ezra Klein makes the point best:

The people who came off best were those who knew the most about the issue. Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn on the Republican side. Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd for the Democrats. But above all of them, the president, who got to enter, adjudicate and conclude discussions at will — not to mention say when others didn’t know that much about the issue, or weren’t offering comments in good faith. That willingness to put himself above Congress, combined with the structure of the event, allowed Obama to fully dominate the proceedings, and he used the opportunity to firmly assert ownership over the health-care bill. This is now his legislation.

It is now his legislation. After all the talk about “Obamacare” the past year, there was never a White House health care plan. There were 5 bills (one for each committee the legislation had to go through), then there were two (the Senate’s and the House’s), and now, finally, there will be one. And it will be Obama’s to win or lose. He spent a year letting Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Congress take the lead, a lesson from his background as a constitutional law professor as well as a lesson learned by Democrats from Bill Clinton’s failure to pass health care reform in 1993. Now it is his.

However, three days after this summit, I don’t feel like it did all that much. Obama was smart and was a good presider, the Congresspeople talked over each other, Republicans have no political reason to capitulate in any way, and Obama showed they have no ideas with the style that has become patented Obama. But he took control of this plan, and perhaps Congressional Democrats will take this event as a turning point towards passing a bill. Regardless, it was a fascinating look at how this President works.

And most importantly, we got tons of shots of the Obama Death Stare. See the photo above. And wither as your face melts off.

Update (3/1/2010):

Ezra Klein on the real purpose of the Health Care Summit:

The Blair House Summit had its purpose, but the major impact was distracting the media for three weeks while Democrats figured out what their next legislative step was going to be. Things like reading the plan aloud or wheeling cameras into the room while partisans make self-serving arguments about the worth of various proposals might serve some purpose, but that purpose isn’t informing people. Instead, it gives people the illusion of being informed, which might be better or might be worse, but is definitely different.

This tends to be the consensus a few days after the event. However, whatever practical purpose the Summit may have served, it was a fascinating look into the style of the President, who ran the discussion.