Summit!

I felt like it'd be good to get something in writing before this thing got started, to see how my views end up comparing with what shakes out.

This summit is about skewing the public's energy either towards or away from health care reform. I wish it had happened a year ago. We might have had a real good-faith negotiation then. But that was before claims of death panels, and Senator DeMint calling the GOP's effort to halt health care reform Obama's Waterloo. That was before the Democrats finally gave up on bringing a few GOP legislators on board. It was before the absolute exasperation that anyone involved in this issue must be feeling after a year of melodrama.

First of all, it's important to remember why the summit got started in the first place. Obama did very well in his meeting with the GOP at their own summit in Baltimore. He saw that when policy is actually debated in a public forum, his ideas came away looking good. Arguing policy instead of politics put things into terms that made his side look better than it had in ages. So when things went south for the health effort, he called for a summit.

The GOP has a harder job today. When taken as policy, the GOP has never been in a good spot with health care. They don't believe in it. At the core, individualism simply does not square with solidarity. They are fundamentally uninterested in comprehensive, secure coverage for all Americans. Health care is another product to be bought and sold; if you want it bad enough you can find the money. If you don't, that's your problem. This view is far to the right of American public opinion. When you get into the morality of health care, most Americans believe that health care is a right, like the fire department, not a privilege, like a movie ticket.

The last thing the GOP wants is for the public to hear what they really believe-- that we're on our own, that nature's competitive pressures will sort things out. Maybe this is a better arrangement, but it's not a popular one. They will come to the table with the maximum amount of ideas that their beliefs will tolerate. They must convince America that they've been serious all along about an issue they don't care about. They must look like a victim of the tyranny of the majority, like the misunderstood underdogs. It seems paradoxical for someone who wants to do nothing to suggest doing something, but only if real results are expected out of this summit. It's about having just enough policy on the table to burnish their image.

The Democrats really don't have a core set of beliefs like the GOP does. Some of them think everything would be better if the government just took over the whole enterprise of paying for health care. Some think that we can make the market work with the right rules. Everyone wants to be reelected, but Democrats tend to believe that it's not what you say, but what you do. The common Democratic fallacy is that people respond to good ideas and little else. Ideas aren't enough. Coming off as confident in those ideas, striking the right emotional notes, using the right vocabulary is every bit as important as the policy. They screw this up again and again. Today, they can't. Today, they must have just enough image on the table to burnish their policy.

None of this is really anything new. A thousand blogs written by a thousand monkeys will one day say the same thing. I'll only add that the momentum seems to be in favor of the Democrats. They have far more to lose than the GOP has to gain. That is the narrative underpinning this whole effort. The media know it, the public knows it. They just need to get out there and fulfill everyone's expectations. Something unexpected will happen. There will be plot twists. Quotable moments will be had by all. But the trajectory of the reform effort will remain unchanged. It will pass. This is a morale moment for the Democrats, a battle on the home soil of health care policy instead of the hostile terrain of nutty town halls.

If nothing else comes of this, the idea of a summit as part of political tradition makes a lot of sense considering the media scrutiny that any public act must countenance these days. Forcing our leaders into real dialogue instead of the mutual monologue permitted by current media formats is just good policy. Politics should be more than a competition; current arrangements tend to exacerbate that natural tendency. Real debates might actually lead to the dialectic that our system depends on. In the future, when big legislation is at stake, I hope these summits happen early and often. Legislators must be held accountable for their statements. Their ideals and policies must be challenged by the opposition in real time. They must put those ideals and policies to work improving America.

Do I think that will happen today? No. But I think we may be at the beginning of the revitalization of something greater than the brutal zero sum game that's been the theme of the past 20-or-so years.