One Summit at a Time

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Leiter gives us an overview of Obama's "bipartisan summit" strategy and asks, in effect, will it work? Some smart people whom I respect say that this is capitulation and error (see Yglesias' "doomed strategy" post). That viewpoint conforms nicely with the basic stance on the left since Scott Brown's election, which has been that either (a) healthcare reform is dead on the floor, or (b) RAHM EMANUEL HAS TO GO BREAK SOME GODDAMN HEADS!!! Those are our choices: procedural hardball or effective defeat. Obama is demurring from both. Here's my theory about why.

Congress is a broken. As Lawrence Lessig has said, it's lost its sense of shame. Max Baucus, head of healthcare reform in the senate, can take 3.3 million dollars from healthcare industries without anyone blinking an eye. The Republicans can make unprecedented procedural moves to paralyze the functioning of government, like filibustering every single bill on the floor. Just this week Richard Shelby, Republican senator from Alabama, put a "hold" on every single one of President Obama's outstanding appointees -- shutting down, effectively, the confirmation process -- in order to fast-track earmark process for his own state (he wants an airbase built). This is either farce or high level tragedy. The place is corrupted at the most basic level. It's caught in a sort of drifting institutional nihilism that threatens to ruin this country.

Americans, I believe, feel this. They're angry and confused. If you follow politics you'd know that it's the Republicans specifically, more than anyone, who have exploited the pathologies of the system to their own political advantage. But if you don't follow politics, if you're more interested in long term problems, in the cost of health care coverage, say, or the amount of money your family has to pay for groceries, then you're inclined to see in Washington the money, the partisanship, the obstructionism, and write off the whole damn system. You don't make a distinction between "Republicans in Washington" and "Washington." Health care looks less like a reflection of the problem and more like a part of the problem itself. People hear that Obama is "negotiating behind closed doors" and "cutting deals" with folks like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, and that he's "ramming the bill through the congress" and they wonder, where is all that "change" we heard about?

Cynicism and disillusionment are the moods roiling through our country, threatening to take down everything in their paths, Obama included. The Scott Brown election, in the end, is a ominous reflection of this intense disillusionment with the system itself.

The bipartisan summit thing is Obama's response to this fact. The goal is to shed sunlight on the swamp of the system. It's a chance for Obama to say to the American people, "Look, I'm not part of the problem!" And it's a chance to say to those who are, those deliberately working to cripple the government, "there will be electoral costs, people will be watching." This is transparency at it's best: informing people about the shit their government is doing, about the dynamics of dysfunction, and then giving them the electoral tools to fix it. This is Obama responding to a moment of great cynicism -- Brown's election -- with a bid for empowerment. That's smart politics, and it's very Obama-esque -- the old-school Obama, the one who fought to change the system, the one who fought to engage our country again.

Will this get us healthcare? We'll see.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of JMTimages