The Obama summit
No one believes that the president's health care summit with Republicans is about bipartisanship.
Republicans fear that it is a trap intended to hold them and their ideas up to ridicule. And though the president and his party certainly want to shift the blame to Republicans after months of unilateral failure by Democrats, that's not the real purpose of the health gabfest.
This summit is all about Barack Obama.
You see, the president has a big problem: He may be our chatterer in chief, but Americans have stopped listening to him.
...Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said of Obama: "He's beginning to not be believable to me."
Rockefeller was talking about the president's support for policies that seem to endorse the use of coal power but that in reality would destroy the industry.
But whether the subject is coal or health or education or government spending, a lot of Americans are tuning Obama out.
Liberals believe this is because Obama lacks the ferocity needed to deal with the concentrated evil of Republicanism. Conservatives believe it's because Obama is too radical.
But for most voters, the explanation is much simpler -- Obama is a typical politician: His words and actions don't match up.
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The White House plans to tack the president's health plan on to the federal budget because the budget requires only 51 votes for passage instead of the usual 60, which would make it impossible for the 41 Republicans to block the plan with a filibuster.
Voters, who disapprove of the president's plan by a 2-to-1 margin, will not be amused by this congressional chicanery.
By embracing the use of budget reconciliation, the president eliminates a convenient means of escape from what figures to be a political disaster. If Obama insisted on following standard parliamentary procedure, he could throw up his hands at Republican obstructionism and get on with the rest of his presidency.
But apparently that is not what Obama wants. He wants to win, not look good losing.
That's where Obama splits from many of his fellow Democrats in Congress.
Obama and his team take seriously what the administration has called the "existential threat" to his presidency posed by Republican obstructionism.
The White House team believes that if the president is defeated on health care, Obama will be dismissed as a weak and ineffective president, brought to his knees by the minority party.
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Obama is willing to sacrifice Democrats to save himself. That sounds like a Pyrrhic victory at best. He is setting himself up for years of misery with a Republican majority passing bills revoking his health care travesty using the reconciliation process which will force him to shut down the government to save a program the public hates.
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