Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jon Chait writes about President Obama’s proposed healthcare summit meeting later this month with Republicans:

Skeptics around Washington are already warning that the summit will be nothing more than Kabuki theater, allowing each side to grandstand on television while providing little in the way of substantive debate or additional understanding for the folks watching back home.

That’s not the point. Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality.

I agree that this is almost certainly Obama’s intent. The question is whether it will work. The GOP leadership has already responded to Obama’s offer with a list of preconditions for the meeting, a tactic straight out of Negotiation 101, but also one that works pretty well. What’s more, if they decide to show up anyway, they’ll be a lot better prepared than they were for their Q&A a week ago. My guess is that they’ll have some pretty good sounding arguments lined up about consumer focused healthcare, the need for market-driven reforms, the evils of top-down government control, etc. etc. Those aren’t things that Obama will be able to conclusively swat down in a few hours.

But we’ll see. I don’t have high hopes for the summit because Democrats haven’t shown much ability to control the media narrative lately, and that’s what this is really all about. Hopefully they’ll do better than I think.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate