"I could go on and on and on."
--House Minority Leader John Boehner in the middle of his presentation at the Health Care Summit
Perhaps the most hopeful sign to emerge from a full day of bipartisan bloviating at Blair House is that the potted plant whose green tendrils were visible behind Barack Obama somehow survived the onslaught of gaseous utterances. Either the much-maligned federal government knows how to nurture a hardy breed of plants or else exposure to seven hours of health care rhetoric is not risky enough to warrant a warning from the Surgeon General.
It is, of course, easy to ridicule a staged political event whose lack of an obvious story line frustrated TV commentators, armchair pundits, and probably many viewers who tuned in. A little more than an hour into the proceedings, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly ridiculed the event on MSNBC as "typical hot air from Washington." And Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cracked mid-afternoon, "To paraphrase Sarah Palin, how is this transparency working out for you?"
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All three cable news networks built their days around the health care talkathon, although the purportedly liberal MSNBC abandoned Obama mid-afternoon to show the bronze medal women's hockey face-off between Finland and Sweden. But it was easy to get a sense of the bending of cable TV's revenue curve as the networks jettisoned commercials to show politicians orating about bending the health care cost curve. As Fox News anchor Shepard Smith put it in a burst of disgusted candor, "I feel like we've missed 60 or 70 commercials today. Maybe 80 or 90...All for what really? So that we can hear the same old Democratic talking points and the same old Republican talking points."
Of course, what is funny about cable TV news anchors is that they depend on predictable sound bites even as they decry them. As the day wore on, Fox and CNN repeatedly cut away from the Blair House blather to interview their own on-air experts. On CNN, Donna Brazile (a real-life Democratic strategist rather than a former assistant bag carrier given a fancy title by cable TV bookers) wrangled with conservative economist Ben Stein over his claim that "a much higher percentage of Republicans are taxpayers than Democrats." Fox News commentators like Star Parker played their assigned ideological roles by denouncing Obama's embrace of "European style socialism."
Once again, the president displayed his public distaste for this style of cable news debating. As Obama relived the 2008 campaign by taking on John McCain, the president snapped, "We can spend the remainder of our time with our respective talking points...My concern is that if we do that, then we're essentially back on Fox News or MSNBC on the split screen just arguing back and forth."
This has always been a valid complaint by Obama, since cable TV news plays a significant role in nurturing the climate of scorched-earth partisanship in Washington. Snarling political incendiaries like conservative Michele Bachmann and liberal Alan Grayson are beloved by cable TV bookers, while quiet and thoughtful House members are lucky to get on public access TV back home in their own districts.
The problem is that the Obama White House (or anyone else) has not come up with a plausible format to replace the steel-cage ideological battles on cable TV. What the Blair House summit represented was the Kabuki of congressional hearings where members self-indulgently play to the cameras and recite home-state political parables. It was hard not to yield to an irresistible urge to check on the women's hockey action on MSNBC when, for example, Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin began his presentation, "I got a letter yesterday from a farmer in Iowa..."
It probably was unreasonable to expect the health care summit to have produced a legislative breakthrough or to have galvanized public opinion. But the failure that rankled was the inability of the Obama White House and the congressional titans of both parties to make substance interesting. Nearly seven hours featuring the nation's political leadership discussing a single topic should have produced a few surprising insights about the American health care system. Instead, the ordeal left me wishing that American politics could still produce a few original thinkers capable of being in the same room with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose career carried him from the Harvard faculty to the Senate.
Maybe the problem is that American politics has created a generation of leaders who thrive by making the most banal and boring public comments, whether they are Harry Reid or John Boehner. You can move them from Capitol Hill to a rectangular table at Blair House, but you cannot lift their rhetoric or their thought processes out of the congressional cloakroom.
As for Thursday afternoon's big news on cable TV, the Finnish women won the bronze, defeating Sweden 3-2 in overtime.
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