Analysis: Obama's "Political Theater" Summit

We're getting close to Obama's latest theatrical excursion, his "summit" on health care. And it's looking like he has placed his "partisan hypocrite" hat firmly on his head.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33251.html

He doesn’t want political theater, he insists, but a serious effort to forge bipartisan consensus.

And yet Obama is unveiling a health care bill just days before the six-hour summit that wouldn’t require a single GOP vote, with plans to short-circuit the Senate rules and push it through without Republicans if necessary.

The Democrats’ push to reform the health care system has always moved on two tracks: the public track — what the president and others say in public — and the private one — what they negotiate behind closed doors.

But those two efforts seem at odds this week like never before, as Obama makes a final public pitch for bipartisan cooperation — with live TV coverage, no less — at the very moment he seems most prepared to abandon it completely. He’s trying to engage Republicans to make his case for reform but is laying the groundwork to go around them if they won’t sign on.

And that's the core of PresBo's quest for partisan approval. He wants this "summit" so that he and the Democrats can ridicule and dismiss GOP proposals and then say, "since you don't have any better suggestions to offer, we'll just shove our liberal bill through.


But in this he'll have to rein in his own party, who want to add things to the reconciliation bill. For example, Reid said that if reconciliation is used then he wants to add a "public option" back into it. And even without that kind of meddling, not even all DEMOCRATS support using reconciliation to pass such a sweeping package.

An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) let reporters know last week that his boss wants to add a public option to the final bill if Democrats choose to pursue a once-arcane procedural maneuver called reconciliation, in which the ruling party only needs a simple 51-vote majority for passage.

But even Democratic leaders are queasy about whether they can muster the votes to pass it in the post-Massachusetts environment. Senate moderates, in particular, have rebelled against the idea of using reconciliation to pass reform.

So that's the picture. PresBo's "compromise bill" is supposed to be posted sometime today, so we'll take a look at it when we can.