A little over a year into his first term, President Obama finally lived up to his election-year promise to hold health-care negotiations on C-SPAN. Better late than never, I suppose.
Unfortunately, both sides came armed with their talking points and pretty much just talked past each other.
Yes, there were sarcastic lines, exasperated sighs and some glaring — but in the end a few raised voices didn’t mark any real progress.
If the White House hoped to portray the Republicans as a bunch of know-nothings with no ideas, it misfired.
One key strategy for the Democrats seemed to be to pretend they were on the brink of agreement with their adversaries. One Dem after another marveled, “We are closer than we think” to reaching a deal with the GOP for health-care reform. They expressed amazement at all the agreement that magically had emerged since before the meeting started.
In reality, of course, the two sides couldn’t be father apart. Did Democrats think their pretense of agreement would leave Americans puzzled when the GOP didn’t make a deal? Good luck with that.
Sorry, this just isn’t about the GOP as much as Democrats want it to be. It’s about whether Obama can be the kind of leader who, with strong majorities in both Houses of Congress, manages to pass his top legislative priority.
Don’t get me wrong: I supported the president’s drive to pass health-care reform this year. But it’s impossible to support the way he’s tried to do it.
Why it’s such a surprise to the White House that Republicans oppose Obama’s approach to health-care reform, I’ll never understand. Maybe somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. needs to subscribe to National Review? There actually are some philosophical differences between the two parties, especially on this issue. Various people tried to make that point at yesterday’s summit — but it fell on deaf ears.
Considering the magnitude of the political losses that Democrats face if they don’t pass some kind of health-care reform, yesterday should have given us something more bold than bad acting by Democratic senators pretending to see agreement that doesn’t exist.
If Obama truly wanted to shame the Republicans, why not do something radical and put tort reform on the table? By offering up a reform that really is GOP orthodoxy, he’d have shown himself serious about doing a bipartisan bill.
Sure, it would have ticked off the trial lawyers, but it also would have made it clear that the president was truly willing to move beyond the usual Washington fare — that he really is post-partisan.
Doesn’t the White House understand that it has lost the debate so far — that it needs to do something to shake things up? Before yesterday’s meeting, we got yet another poll showing Americans sour on ObamaCare: Gallup found Americans skeptical that any deals would be struck at the summit, with 49 percent opposing (to 42 supporting) any health-care bill that looks like what Obama and congressional Dems have proposed.
The political reality is that the Republicans have the wind at their back. Everyone seems to know this — yet the White House is acting like one health-care summit will undo the last nine months, when the GOP message machine has set the parameters of this debate: Obama and the Democrats want to take away your health care and kill your grandma. They won’t be stopped until our health-care system looks like the UK’s.
How bad is the disconnect? Sen. Harry Reid opened the meeting by essentially lying — saying that Democrats haven’t even considered using reconciliation to pass a Democrat-only bill. Huh? How stupid do they think people are?
The summit didn’t bring us any closer to health-care reform. It’s time for the president to stop playing games and get his hands dirty. If he isn’t going to offer serious concessions to the GOP, then he should focus on getting his own caucus on board. If he’s going to go the reconciliation route, just do it and don’t make excuses or pretend that it’s not an option on the table.
If health-care reform is as critical as Obama has told us, if it’s necessary for the physical health of Americans and the economic health of the country, then what’s he waiting for?
Obama has said he’d rather be a good one-term president than a bad two-term president. It’s time to prove it.
kirstenpowers@aol.com