Last month I wrote about President Obama’s stepping into the lion’s den of his Republican opponents in a debate without precedent. Well last week I got a chance to witness a similar political debate involving the President and his adversaries.
The occasion this time was a ‘healthcare summit’ but this meeting was held on the President’s own White House turf. This time round, the Republican lawmakers in attendance were the President’s invited guests, and were forced to share some of their televised speaking time with a number of Congressional Democrats who the President had also invited.
But unlike President Obama’s one-man show last month, this second meeting was much more formal and prepared. As a consequence, many of the questions posed to the President by both Republicans and Democrats were nothing more than elaborate talking rather than real queries that attempted to find common ground with their political opponents.
I was disappointed by all of their political posturing, but I really can’t say I was surprised given the fact that those in attendance had known for two weeks that they would be posing their questions on national television. There was little or no inclination to compromise.
That not to say there weren’t a few spontaneous outbursts, as well as some rather heated exchanges that highlighted just how divided the US Congress has become over the past year. But as the moderator of this exchange of views, President Obama repeatedly scolded members of both parties when they lapsed into election campaign speeches. In fact, several times it appeared that the President was the only real grown-up in the room.
Although I am an unabashed Obama supporter, I am also an American Republican who yearns for a return to the more civil and less partisan Congressional politics that characterised the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. I also know I’m not alone in wishing for some semblance of compromise on the important issues facing our nation, as poll after poll shows that the majority of American voters are thoroughly disgusted with partisan politics.
Unfortunately many of those same Americans also blame the problems in Washington on Congressmen from other states, not their own. Therein lies the rub. How do you encourage lawmakers to cross party lines and work together if you reward those who won’t by re-electing them?
President Obama may be the leader of the world’s most powerful country, but the truth is his own powers to address the problems facing America are limited by Congress, which must agree before any proposals can turn to action. He spent much of his time explaining to the viewing audience what his healthcare proposals actually were, as opposed to what his opponents said they meant.
But understanding his role as the moderator rather than the Democratic opponent of Congressional Republicans, he also repeatedly pointed to the specific areas of his healthcare proposals that many Republicans agreed with. The President made a point of complimenting Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma for many of his healthcare suggestions, and noted that although his own proposal also included some of these, he was open to including more.
Still, at the end of the day the Republicans as a whole appeared to be no more willing to compromise than they were beforehand. So the President closed the meeting by warning Republicans that he would move forward without them if they continued to refuse to compromise.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in International Relations and lectures on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU
