Bipartisanship's 2010 Debut

My name is Jordan Faires, and I'm a first-year at Oxy who hails from the Seattle area. I am a liberal democrat who has been a believer in health care reform, especially with a public option.

In 2009, Barack Obama's efforts to win Republican support for health care reform went over about as well as Martha Coakley's recent efforts to win over Red Sox fans. That is to say: they didn't.

But that's not stopping him from trying again. According to recent reports, Obama is holding a televised bipartisan summit on health care reform on February 25th. The President has invited Republican Congressional leaders to bring their ideas to the table to discuss a compromise on the final bills. Could this idea for a televised discussion stem from Obama's successful speech at the Republican retreat, and the criticism he received for not televising debates on CSPAN? Probably.

Despite Obama's rhetorical advantages, how successful can this bipartisan effort be? We can look at it in two ways:

One)

Liberal Democrats have already cut so much from the bill to appease Republicans (and centrist Democrats such as Joe Lieberman) in the hopes of bipartisanship that they're not going to want to budge on more compromises. The Democrats (and Obama) have to pass something though if they don't want to lose substantial respect and credibility. This puts them in a sticky situation. How much more do they give up before they're able to pass at least a ghost of what the bill just was? The Republicans know that they can filibuster now. They're not going to budge unless they get what they want.

In the health care reform debate so far, bipartisanship has consisted of the Democrats retreating from their position to hopefully gain some kind of non-existent Republican support. The Republicans have been somewhat nihilistic (a charged word, I know) in their voting so far, and unless they can accept some compromise I honestly don't see how successful this new venture could be.

Two)

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic (disclosure: my favorite blog) had another good point about this bipartisan summit:

I think it shows that Obama is going to keep revealing just how centrist and sensible much of the Senate bill is, move away from ideological histrionics toward specifics and use this process as a way to call Republicans' bluff and Democratic purism in the House as well as explain to the public what is actually in the bill (hint: not socialism).
...
Politically, it seems to me that for independent voters, it's in the interests of the GOP to show they are not merely obstructionist and in the interests of the House Democrats that they are not mere purists.

Let's hope that it turns out this way. The bill is rational and reasonable, and hopefully this kind of transparent logic can bring about real change: an actual compromise.