Well, they’ve tried transparency. Now what?
If you were interested in finding out — and if you had 6 1/2 hours to spare — all you had to do was watch the entire health care summit.
But in case you weren’t that interested — which is the way to guess — I’ll give you the short version of what happened at Blair House: Nothing much exciting happened, other than the Obama-McCain smackdown, but you need to see the video yourself (preferably in high-def) for full viewing enjoyment.
Barack Obama, sitting at the head of the table, was always in view. He owned the room, which is what you’d expect. He was part game- show host, part law professor, part know-it-all. He was the one who decided who got the answers right, and let’s just say House Minority Leader John Boehner had better cram for the next test.
“John, every so often,” Obama told him, “we have a pretty good conversation trying to get on some specifics, and then we go back to, you know, the standard talking points.”
OK, there were talking points and there were debating points, but none of it really mattered, not when everyone knows the ending before the debate begins. Republicans still don’t like the health care bill, and Democrats still can’t stand the fact that Republicans still don’t like the health care bill.
There’s a philosophy gap, and, yes, there’s a political chasm. But what became clear, the longer you watched, was that there was no Obama strategy gap. Obama’s mission was to let everything be said — which will take most of a day — so that he can make the case eventually that more talking simply won’t do any good. And who’s going to argue with that?
The summit ended with Obama asking Republicans to do some “soul searching” — a setup line for late- night comics everywhere — in order to find some common ground on a health care bill.
He gave the Republicans a month or six weeks, not that Obama has a great record on deadlines. But eventually, he basically promised, it’ll be Action Obama, urging the Senate to take the health care bill to reconciliation, a parliamentary device that is, of course, soon to be a major point of contention throughout America, even if most of America has no idea what reconciliation is.
In case you’re playing catch-up, reconciliation is a tricky device used by the majority party to avoid a filibuster, which is, of course, a tricky device the minority party uses to keep the majority from getting anything passed.
Whatever you hear, the debate over reconciliation is not a morality play. It isn’t a matter of who’s right or wrong. It’s a matter of who controls the debate in the Scott Brown era. Republicans have used reconciliation in the past — and used it, in fact, to get the massive Bush tax cuts passed — just as Democrats used to like the filibuster back in the day.
I was a little surprised to see Obama begin to make the case for reconciliation so soon. It’s risky to make the case that 51 votes out of 100 is a majority to most Americans.
But this was the day Obama took full ownership of the health care bill, and with all the cameras rolling. If you watched him in the room with unsmiling Harry Reid and mostly silent Nancy Pelosi and not-quite- silent-enough Joe Biden, it was obvious whose bill this was.
The Republicans were better prepared this time to take on Obama than in his meeting with House Republicans, but it was still a mismatch.
Sen. Tom Coburn, the doctor/politician from Oklahoma, was the Republican star. But when Coburn wasn’t talking, there was always the chance you’d hear from, say, Sen. John Barrasso, the doctor/politician from Wyoming, who tried to make the head-scratching case that we’d all be better off if everyone had only catastrophic health insurance.
If the day was mostly for talking points, though, it wasn’t a three-ring circus. In fact, the circus rarely spilled over from one ring. The debate went something like this:
Democrat: You see, we’re not really that far apart.
Republican: Scrap this bill, Mr. President, and start over, preferably on a clean sheet of paper.
Republicans argued for malpractice reform, for selling insurance across state lines and for letting the market take care of things. It wasn’t exactly a serious argument. Meanwhile, Obama protested that Republicans keep calling the bill a government takeover, which is what they called it when the public option was still in play and what they still call it now that the public option is gone.
That’s all prologue now. Republicans know Obama can talk a good game. But even though they like to accuse him of Chicago-style politics, they’re not necessarily convinced he can tough it out when it counts.
The summit wasn’t to persuade Republicans. It was for Obama to make the case to the public and, maybe more to the point, to make the case to his fellow Democrats that he needs 51 votes in the Senate and 217 in the House.
The 6 1/2-hour summit is over. But the game, after a year of talk, is still underway.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
