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.

Because the Washington media loves those like Bayh who position themselves as bipartisan or centrist (especially when it comes to the issue of the deficit), progressives derided his so-called “centrism” as mere political positioning that helped Republicans obstruct Democratic initiatives, and met his exit with a flurry of blog posts with titles like “Bye, Bayh” or “Bayh Low” (“Bayh” is pronounced “Bye” or “Buy” – thus explaining my overly complicated attempt at a joke in my blog title). Ezra Klein called him an “ordinary politician” and a “minor deficit hypocrite”. Jonathan Chait goes farther, and notes that “If Bayh’s loss is a “brain drain,” then the Senate is in even worse shape than I thought.”

I once had the chance, along with numerous other reporters and editors, to speak with Bayh in an off-the-record context. I’d say the group was quite favorably disposed toward him going into the discussion — here was a young, popular, telegenic moderate Democrat everybody could see on a presidential ticket soon. As far as I could tell, everybody came away thoroughly unimpressed. He said nothing especially disagreeable, it was just that he seemed so mediocre. He expressed himself entirely in terms of platitudes. Not a single interesting thought escaped his lips.

He had no better luck appealing to the other side. The allure of centrism is that it is at the edge between the left-most Republicans and the right-most Democrats, and thus the deals are made and the power is held in the center. Bayh (and Max Baucus, and most Senate Democrats, and even President Obama) have learned the hard way that there is no reason to be centrist if the other side – even at its left-most reaches – refuses to do anything but obstruct. But Bayh wasn’t close to right-wing enough for any Republicans on any key issues, as Ross Douthat says:

His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn’t catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced.  (Bayh preferred the “bravery” of punting the issue to a commission.) On foreign policy, he was a liberal hawk on every vote except the hard ones: He backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 and takes a hard line on Iran today, but in the debate over the surge, when being hawkish was suddenly costly, he sided with the doves. Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh — and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.

The incredible thing, however, is what Bayh has done since announcing his retirement.  A two-faced politician of average intelligence to the left and too far left for todays right, Bayh has grabbed the issue of Senate disfunction with both hands. He penned an op-ed for the New York Times on Feb. 20th that outlined his reasons for leaving the Senate, and decrying the “institutional inertia gripping Congress” and the fact that “Congress must be reformed”. Its a remarkably thoughtful document (I would urge everyone to read it through), and one that (in addition to Bayh’s media tour since announcing his retirement) has brought the issue of Senate reform and filibuster reform into the Washington Conventional Wisdom (yes, the CW does need to be capitalized). Bayh’s most important ideas are these:

Filibusters should require 35 senators to sign a public petition and make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.

Filibusters should also be limited to no more than one for any piece of legislation. Currently, the decision to begin debate on a bill can be filibustered, followed by another filibuster on each amendment, followed by yet another filibuster before a final vote. This leads to multiple legislative delays and effectively grinds the Senate to a halt.

What’s more, the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

It is not so surprising that many of those voices decrying Bayh’s legislative record and subsequent retirement are now singing his praises. Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the most prominent, with Klein bemoaning the fact that Bayh decided to make Senate reform an issue after he decided to leave the Senate instead of staying in the Senate to fight for those reforms. I’m not sure I agree. I believe the whole saga speaks to my personal view of the Senate, which is that those on the inside of the Senate are unable to see the dysfunctions that cripple the institution. Bayh is probably smarter than I gave him credit for before this weekend – I think his op-ed proves that – but something about being in the Senate, whether it was the constant campaign or the hunt for legislative power, hurt his ability to see the Senate as it really is. The moment he decided to leave the Senate he saw the dysfunction, and despite the jokes about his involvement in the dysfunction he insisted on using that as his reason for leaving. I don’t want you to stay in the Senate, Mr. Bayh. You’re much better off as a living, breathing example of why the Senate needs to reform itself.

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“.

In an unrelated development, here’s an 800 word Dana Milbank article in The Washington Post about why is Peter Orszag sexy.

Meanwhile, here’s Jeff Frankel (presumably wearing pajamas) talking about Chilean economic policy and the political economy of counter-cyclical budgeting.

What the Senate is not allowed to do, however, is tell future senators what rules must apply to their proceedings. Because Reichelderfer prohibits a previous Congress from tying the hands of a future Congress, the rules governing Senate procedure in 2010 cannot bind a newly elected Senate in 2011. The old Senate rules essentially cease to exist until the new Senate ratifies them, so a determined bloc of 51 senators could eliminate the filibuster altogether by demanding a rules change at the beginning of a new session. Once the new Senate begins to operate under the old rules, however, this can function as a ratification of the old rules — essentially locking those rules in place for another two years.

Millhiser is basically arguing that two Supreme Court decisions, Newton v. Commissioners in 1879 and Reichelderfer v. Quinn in 1932, make it possible for each new Senate to eliminate the filibuster, since the new Senate (the next one beginning in January 2011) isn’t beholden to any Senate procedures from previous Senates.

Practically, from the Democrats’ point of view, I do how this helps anything. First of all, Millhiser does not mention the procedures with which each new Senate, after swearing in any new members, ratifies the new rules that the body functions under. If the Senate begins to proceed without changing anything, then that acts as a ratification, but how procedurally difficult is it for 51 Senators to push through a new set of rules when a functioning Senate (oh my goodness what an oxymoron) is all that it takes to not eliminate the filibuster?

Secondly, I can’t imagine the Democrats having the political will or ability to do something like this next January. They are almost certain to lose seats in November, and due to the specific seats that are up for grabs this year the seats the Dems are most likely to lose aren’t the most conservative Democrats (for a good roundup of next November, check out Nate Silver’s analysis. His most recent update is here). Thus, while there may be 51 or 50 Senators in this Congress willing to eliminate the filibuster, the median Senator next January is most likely going to be too far to the right to want to mess with Senate procedures in a way that would benefit the Democrats.

Finally, I can only imagine that this sort of uprising, if it took place, would need the approval and cooperation of Majority Leader Harry Reid, who I cannot imagine approving of something like this. It tends to be the longest tenured Senators who are the most likely to defend arcane Senate procedures like the filibuster, and I doubt Reid is any different.

Basically, liberals have been frustrated by uniform Republican opposition and the super-majority requirement since President Obama took office, and this is the first I have heard of this proposal. It is a very interesting idea, but I can’t imagine that it is anything more than a very intriguing shot in the dark.

…populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

Probably a bit simplistic, but any one-paragraph summation of a subject like “populism in Washington D.C.” is always going to be. Still, a good way to start thinking about a political philosophy that is going to be quite dominant in our post-bailout political culture.

Sure, in recent years, threats of filibuster have become more and more common — and getting 60 votes for key pieces of legislation has seemed to become evermore necessary. But at the same time, we rarely actually see senators filibustering, at least not like Jimmy Stewart’s character did in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Why?

The whole piece is worth a close read – though the title of the article gets to the gist of the matter: “How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Filibustering”. There currently are very few actual filibusters – the mere threat of one is enough to derail legislation (as we are currently seeing with the Health Care Reform legislation that has already passed both Chambers of Congress). This occurred, according to Senate historian Donald A. Richie, because:

…leaders — from Democrats Mike Mansfield and Robert Byrd to Republicans Bob Dole and Bill Frist — informally adopted the custom of no longer actually filibustering — mainly, Ritchie said, because filibustering was seen as a waste of time that only provided the filibustering minority an excess of attention.

It turns out that only one Senator from the filibustering group needs to be present to prevent cloture from occurring, but leadership needs 60 votes for cloture present on the Senate floor. Unfortunately, this busts the myth, heard from Republicans from 2004 to 2006 and currently heard from Democrats the country over, that the majority should just let the minority filibuster away until they are blue in the face. I’ve definitely voiced the opinion that Harry Reid should let Health Care Reform be filibustered, then go on camera comparing Republican filibusters to Strom Thurmond filibustering Civil Rights legislation in 1957 by reading his grandmother’s biscuit recipe (fun fact: Thurmond’s filibuster is on record as the longest ever by a single Senator at 24 hours and 18 minutes). Obviously, thats my flaming liberal side mixing with my (very dubious) political tactician side to come to an incorrect conclusion – letting Republicans filibuster would not be a good PR move for Harry Reid and the Democrats!

Once again, I would suggest that everyone read the TPM piece I linked to above, or Ryan Grim’s piece in the Huffington Post last February (during the stimulus package debate). The money quote:

“Delay in the Senate is not difficult and, frankly, the only way to end it is through cloture.”

Yes, delay is the Senate’s middle name.

And somehow I suspect that at that nadir for Reagan, commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson and Brooks would not be advising him to heed public opinion, give up on his agenda, and recognize that it’s madness to push through policies that were broadly unpopular. Au contraire. Fight, Mr President. Fight. In the end, even the conservatives – perhaps especially the conservatives – will respect you for it.

Today, he quotes the President’s speech in Ohio. He is fighting:

… So if I was trying to take the path of least resistance, I would have done something a lot easier. But I’m trying to solve the problems that folks here in Ohio and across this country face every day. And I’m not going to walk away just because it’s hard. We are going to keep on working to get this done — with Democrats, I hope with Republicans — anybody who’s willing to step up. Because I’m not going to watch more people get crushed by costs or denied care they need by insurance company bureaucrats. I’m not going to have insurance companies click their heels and watch their stocks skyrocket because once again there’s no control on what they do. So long as I have some breath in me, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your President, I will not stop fighting for you.

From watching the President all year – not to mention the 18 months before the November 2008 Election – I find myself surprised that other people are surprised that it has taken Obama this long to take a confrontational tone. That has never been his style. He has been inspirational, yes, and I believe that there are a lot of confrontational liberals who projected that personality onto him, but those who pay attention know that Obama shows a distaste for this kind of politics. Unfortunately, being the only sane person in a city-full of crazy people doesn’t get any results, and the President has, I think, finally figured that out.

The President is a really smart man, and unlike the last President we had, is ok with admitting mistakes. From Obama’s interview with George Stephanopoulos:

And, you know, If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. And that I do think is a mistake of mine. I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on the, you know this provision, or that law, or are we making a good, rational decision here –

STEPHANOPOULOS: That people would get it.

OBAMA: That people will get it. And I think that, you know, what they’ve ended up seeing is this feeling of remoteness and detachment where, you know, there’s these technocrats up here, these folks who are making decisions.

He believed that if he just ran the country competently (which he undoubtedly has), then people would appreciate him for it and he wouldn’t have to play the ugly side of politics. Too bad he is still the single sane man in the crazy town of Washington. Or maybe its a good thing for him. Massachusetts can be a wake-up call. The silver-lining. He now has an incentive to fight. Not just for health care reform, but for his presidency and what he wants it to represent. In the words of Sullivan: “Fight, Mr. President. Fight”.

But President Barack Obama’s first year has brought an unusual number of holds, and on unusually prominent positions. One year into the Bush administration, there were 70 appointees awaiting confirmation. One year into the Obama administration, there are 177. And dozens of those holds are directly affecting the agencies responsible for the United States’ security and foreign policy, amid two wars and an amped-up terrorism threat. The United States has no ambassador to Ethiopia, no head of the Office of Legal Counsel, no director at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, no agricultural trade representative.

So there you have it. 177 people who should be doing important government work are held up by partisan demands. And it is partisan – you can tell from the difference between President Obama’s unconfirmed nominees and previous administrations. It also has unintended side effects – besides the inefficiency of the federal government. Ezra Klein:

A little-noticed side effect of holds is that they reduce government accountability. There are 20 Treasury nominees awaiting confirmation. And that’s amidst the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Consider the implications of that, and not just in the performance of the Treasury Department. Many people — both Democrats and Republicans — want Obama to fire Geithner, or some of the people who work for him. But the chance of that happening is approximately zero so long as Obama can’t be confident in his ability to smoothly fill that position. If you can’t hire new people, then you can’t get rid of old people.

The White House has a full list of their nominees – confirmed and unconfirmed – HERE.

Overall, while I would probably take Coakley’s side of a 3:1 wager, her situation looks to be increasingly difficult. She is basically relying upon getting solid turnout from a “silent majority” of voters who have done little to make themselves seen and heard. We know that there are a huge number of potential such voters in Massachusetts, which remains a very blue state and which until the past three weeks had not behaved unusually in any obvious way. But the pollsters are no longer seeing and hearing from them.

So the question on everyones mind is: what does the result of tomorrows election say about the chances for health care reform? On the one hand, a win by Coakley would basically ensure the passage of a compromise bill, as negotiations between the Senate and the House have proceeded basically as expected, and both could pass the final bill in the next two weeks. However, if Brown wins, what happens? The Democrats would lose their “supermajority” of 60 seats in the Senate, and thus would be unable to break a Republican filibuster in the Senate. So, considering the stakes for not only the Democrats politically, but also more than 30 million uninsured Americans, what can we expect the Senate to do if Coakley cannot hold on?

Jonathan Chait at The New Republic has outlined the options for Congressional Democrats and the President:

1. Finish up the House-Senate negotiations quickly and hold a vote before Scott Brown is seated. Republicans will scream, but how could they scream any louder? It’s a process argument of murky merits that will be long forgotten by November.

2. Get the House to pass the Senate bill, and maybe use a reconciliation bill (which only needs a Senate majority to pass) to implement as many House-Senate compromises as possible.

3. Go back to Olympia Snowe. I have not seen any persuasive reporting, or even conjecture, about what Snowe is actually thinking. Her substantive demands have been met. By the end of the process, her only demand was to delay the bill by some unspecified time period, which is such a vacuous demand that it’s hard to believe it represents her actual beliefs. Did she turn against the bill completely? Did she decide that she couldn’t take the heat for voting yes? Or did she figure that, with sixty Democrats, her voted wouldn’t really be needed so there was no reason for her to take the heat? If options 1 and 2 fail, we may find out about Snowe.

Obviously, the alternative is option 4: Crawl into a hole and die

Setting aside the insanity of requiring 60% of a chamber to make something a law, as the Senate does with the filibuster, this incredibly unavoidable and very peculiar situation shows us another side of the insanity of Washington. It isn’t just the lawmakers. Its the Washington media. It doesn’t really matter what the situation is, every political situation must be explained by who won and who lost. Thus, the election tomorrow is only going to be discussed as a referendum on President Obama and the health care bill. If Coakley wins, it will most likely be by a narrow margin, which in the blue state of Massachusetts will be seen as a loss for Obama. If Brown wins, Democrats will more than likely still pass a bill by one of the methods that Chait described, and the Republicans and the media (who love a racket) will howl about how the Democrats are going against the will of the people. You can just tell its coming, and it is ridiculous. Not only will they have passed this bill with 59% of the Senate, but those 59 Senators represent 61.20% of the population of the United States (based on U.S. Census data). Not only THAT, but I really doubt that if Brown wins it will tell anyone anything about what the population of Massachusetts thinks about Obama or his health care plan. Massachusetts has universal health care, its plan is very similar to the current Senate plan (which is closer to what the final bill will look like), and it polls very highly. The only difference is that the Senate plan controls costs better than the Massachusetts plan that Republican Scott Brown voted for. Guess what Republicans like to pretend is the worst part of the health care bills? Its expense.

Will Fox News or MSNBC or CNN or Mike Allen (from Politico) or Mark Halperin (at Time) or any other MSM political reporter ever bring up any of these facts? No. They will ignore the fact that this election, whether Coakley wins or loses, is mostly about Coakley running a terrible campaign, being a lackluster candidate, Brown running a solid underdog campaign, and the economy being in bad shape due to the lack of any sort of fiscal sanity during President Bush’s term (yes, its still his fault).

But of course, this election is all about Obama, right?