Now that Democrats have lost their filibuster-busting majority in the Senate, the dynamic in Washington has changed. Throughout the reform effort, Republicans have been unified in their opposition to the Democrats' proposals. When the Dems had 60 votes, they could ignore the GOP. But now that they've lost just one vote and were reduced to 59, Democrats are finding out that Republicans matter.
Fortunately for the future of reform, President Obama understands this and has recently been making a huge effort to appeal to Republicans in Congress. In a public display of bipartisanship, Obama spoke at the annual retreat of Republican members of the House of Representatives in Baltimore on Jan. 29. There, he told an intensely skeptical audience – most of who are hostile to many of his policies – that he's fed up with business as usual in Washington. Representatives for the GOP said they were happy to listen to the president, but were not willing to sacrifice their political beliefs – and most said they doubted that the president really wanted to listen to their ideas.
Still, Obama's poise before the party was most definitely a victory. When Republicans asked such loaded questions as, "When will you stop being a socialist?" Obama not only called them out on their behavior, but focused his remarks on substance and the need for bipartisanship. Better still for his political outlook, Obama is taking the reform dialogue to a whole new level. Republicans have been accurately complaining they've been excluded from negotiations concerning health care reform. So before the Super Bowl, the president announced he would convene a bipartisan health care reform summit with legislative leaders, to be televised live on Feb. 25, 2010.
"I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward," Obama told the New York Times.
