Obama’s Task: Deliver One Message To Five Audiences
President Barack Obama’s “summit” Thursday is officially billed as a meeting of the minds with congressional Republicans — but, in truth, Republicans are the least of his concerns.
Obama will kick off the event, according to its schedule, by speaking to the congressional leaders seated around the table with him. But his most important listeners may not be in the small room at Blair House where the event will take place.
He’ll be making the sale, for the umpteenth time, to an American public that supports aspects of health care legislation but opposes the bill. He’ll be pitching Beltway graybeards obsessed, as always, with bipartisanship. He’ll be appealing to moderate Senate Democrats to back reconciliation.
But most important will be his pitch to a handful of conservative Democrats in the House who will have to switch their votes and vote for the Senate health care bill for it to pass into law.
“It’s a classic situation where he’s got multiple audiences,” said former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. “The American people are obviously one big piece of his audience, especially independent voters who are moving away from Democratic policies. But he’s got to persuade those Democrats who are at risk to vote for this thing.”
The summit, the latest in a long line of much-anticipated, carefully staged health care events, carries unusual promise and attention because of the current state of confusion on Capitol Hill.
Republican opposition remains total, with the sole House GOP member who voted for health care legislation last year returning to the fold. Senate moderates still need a lot of convincing to use reconciliation, the only path for passing a set of compromise measures into law. And most ominously, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an administration ally, has told the White House she’s unsure whether she can muster the 217 votes required get the Senate bill through the House.
Thus, Obama’s message will have to be nuanced enough to touch a number of bases:
1) House Democrats
Pelosi affirmed to reporters Tuesday what she’d told the White House in private: She’s not sure she has the votes.
“It’s getting good reception in our caucus, but we have more work to do to have everyone on board,” she said.
Obama’s revisions are aimed at bringing on board doubters on the left and the right. His proposal to reduce the excise tax is aimed both at the labor left, which reviles a tax that will affect union health plans, and at conservatives concerned about any middle-class tax hike. His plan to end a special deal for Nebraska could offer moderates a chance to claim they’d fought for and won a victory for transparency.
The idea is to show House Democrats that “this is the last best hope for health care reform,” said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist close to the White House, who said Obama should use the summit to drive home the point to these Democrats, who are bitter that circumstances have favored the Senate’s version of legislation, that his plan is “better than the status quo.”
To that end, a dramatic illustration of Republican Intransigence should help.
“Nothing [would unite] the people of Earth like a threat from Mars,” said Begala, predicting that Democrats would see “the Republicans ... stick to their talking points and be utterly, bitterly unreasonable.”
2) Senate Democrats
Only marginally less jittery than House Democrats are their Senate counterparts, at least 50 of whom must vote to bypass standard procedures and pass elements of the plan with a bare majority.
Part of Obama making that sale is simply to remind Democrats that if they’ve already voted for it once, there’s little additional harm in doing so again. And the summit may appeal to their higher instincts.
“This makes the case that the other guys aren’t taking this seriously,” a senior Senate aide said. “If you are a retiring member who’s trying to decide whether to do right by your party or if you’re looking to the next election.”
“He has to convince people that they’re more Bob Kerrey than Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky,” the aide said, referring to two members of Congress who took tough votes for the party in the early 1990s.
Kerrey was reelected. Margolies-Mezvinsky was sent packing after one term in office.
3) The Public
More important to members of Congress than the judgment of history, however, is American public opinion. And Obama’s pitch to the people on the other side of the pool camera at Blair House will be central to Thursday’s event, which is expected to be carried in part on the cable news networks and in full on C-SPAN, and to figure prominently on the evening news.
“House Democrats have told Obama, ‘Move the needle on public opinion,’ and that’s what this is about,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University who studies the politics of health care.
The event gives Obama an opportunity to do what he avoided in 2009: to take health care away from faceless and unpopular congressional figures and make it his own. And it allows him a final chance to make the case that the legislation is anything but radical and dangerous to the segment of the American public that remains open to the notion.
“Those independent voters who seem to have turned against health care are reachable by Barack Obama — they like him, they voted for him,” Begala said.
But Republicans doubt whether yet another presidential appearance on the topic — the columnist Charles Krauthammer recently noted that Obama had already given 29 of them — can really do much good.
“The people he’s trying to talk to are the 57 or 58 percent of people who oppose his health care plan,” said the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. “They can’t get their own people to vote for it. How are they going to convince independents and Republicans that this is a good deal?”
And the president’s plan makes only small modifications to the Senate bill.
“They have a facts problem,” former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino said. “If they don’t change the underlying facts, nothing is going to change.”
4) Fans of Bi-partisanship
“Bipartisanship” has always been a special cause of Washington’s opinion makers, and Obama’s determination to spend a day engaging Republican ideas appears intended, in part, to win them over.
“Some of this is about the Washington press corps and the Washington elite public-opinion-forming circles. A lot of the battle is there,” Morone said.
5) Republicans
Last, and least, among Obama’s audiences are the Republicans seated around the table with him to whom he’s promised to listen. Republican leaders have already demanded that he scrap all existing legislation and start from scratch and are already doing what they can to discredit the meeting in advance based on his unwillingness to do so.
“I’m not too hopeful for the outcome being positive given where the president has gone yesterday,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor told POLITICO on Thursday. “He really has tainted the ability for any productive outcome by throwing his lot in with the Democratic bills in the House and the Senate.”
A spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, Ken Spain, said that theWhite House is already working on a legislative strategy that relies on no Republican votes, and that most supporters of the legislation view any serious attempt to engage the GOP with contempt.
“I can’t help but worry from the Democrats’ perspective that Obama really thinks that the path here is to forge some bipartisan compromise,” said Morone, a supporter. “I don’t know how many times Lucy has to lift the football.”
But few strategists think there’s much chance Obama will surprise Republicans with a major compromise.
Obama is trying to “embarrass them in the guise that he’s trying to work with them,” Perino said.
And some Democrats said they hoped that plan would work, regardless of the fate of health care legislation.
The event may be “a tool in November to make clear that this is the “party of no” when it comes to reform,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist.
Sources: Politico
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