I don’t know if you watched any coverage of today’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit but it was remarkable. Obama made some opening statements and then the invitees broke up into working groups. There were groups for Social Security, Healthcare, Tax Reform, Budget Process, and Procurement. But that wasn’t the fascinating part. When the groups were done, they reassembled as a larger group and Obama addressed them again. And when he was done making his statement, he began calling on the audience, starting with Senator John McCain. He called on Democrats and Republicans and organizational leaders, and he asked them for feedback on what they had learned and discussed in their groups.
If you didn’t actually see it, it’s hard to express to you the effect this had. It was the equivalent of forcing cousins that don’t really like each other to play together while the grown-ups enjoy their Thanksgiving. Instantaneously, the whole oppositional game the Republicans have been playing was rendered silly, childish, and moot. Any idea that Obama is insincere about bipartisanship seemed churlish, and any idea that his bipartisanship is a fool’s errand seemed shortsighted.
One particularly enlightening exchange occurred when a Republican congressman (the White House transcript doesn’t identify him) stood up and implored the president to do more for bipartisanship than just hold a summit.
Update [2009-2-24 0:28:17 by BooMan]: The congressman was Joe Barton of Texas’ Sixth District.
Q Mr. President, thank you for having us here at the White House. I’m going to take a little bit different approach. Senator Baucus mentioned it and Chairman Rangel mentioned it –the need for bipartisanship, and I think the House Republicans have shown that when we’re not included in the decision-making, we’re disinclined to sign off on the solution.
And it’s very easy in the House — it’s set up to get things done quickly if the majority is united — to forget about the minority. But if you really want consensus, I would encourage you to encourage the Speaker to have a true open process. This is a good first step, but if this is all we do, it’s a sterile step.
On the other hand, if you really follow up and include everybody in the process, you’re more than likely to get a solution that everybody signs off on. And I have said or stood behind every President since Reagan in this room at bill signing ceremonies that were the result of consensus. So I commend you for doing this.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think you’re making an important point. And, you know, my response, first of all is, I’m not in Congress so I don’t want to interject myself too much into congressional politics. But I do want to make this point, and I think it’s important — on the one hand, the majority has to be inclusive. On the other hand, the minority has to be constructive.
And so to the extent that on many of these issues we are able to break out of sort of the rigid day-to-day politics and think long term, then what you should see, I think, is the majority saying, what are your ideas; the minority has got to then come up with those ideas and not just want to blow the thing up. And I think that on some of these issues, we’re going to have some very real differences and, you know, presumably the majority will prevail unless the minority can block it. But you’re just going to have different philosophical approaches to some of these problems.
But on the issue that was just raised here on procurement, on the issues — some of the issues surrounding health care, the way it cuts isn’t even going to be Democratic/Republican. It’s going to be — you know, there may be regional differences, there may be a whole host of other differences. And if that’s — if we can stay focused on solving problems, then I will do what I can, through my good offices, to encourage the kind of cooperation you’re encouraging.
Plain and simple. Barack Obama isn’t the devil and he isn’t 100% wrong about everything and he isn’t looking to railroad Republicans or to dismiss anything individual members might have to contribute. And, thus, the whole Republican playbook is filled with plays that won’t gain a first down, let along a touchdown.
And, honestly, we all have to learn from this just as much as the Republicans do. We’re all so jaded and scarred from the last thirty years of politics that we don’t know any other way to operate. We are suspicious of the very concept of a Fiscal Responsibility Summit that puts entitlement reform on the table. We don’t want to work with Republicans and we consider use of any of their ideas to be something between foolishness and cowardice. It’s a reflection of decades of ever-increasing political polarization. But, I’m telling you, Obama is going to keep putting us in the sandbox together until we start changing our behavior. Even if turns out that we can’t work together, the whole spectacle is unlike anything I’ve seen in my life, and it’s pure political gold.