Not as Dull as Expected!

By DAVID BROOKS
NYT

Going in, I was as cynical as everybody else about the Blair House health care forum. I was planning to watch for a half-hour and then write about something else.

But the event was more meaningful than that. Most of the credit goes to President Obama. The man really knows how to lead a discussion. He stuck to specifics and tried to rein in people who were flying off into generalities. He picked out the core point in any comment. He tried to keep things going in a coherent direction.

Moreover, he seemed to be trying to get a result. Republicans had their substantive criticism of the Democratic bills, but Obama kept pressing them for areas of agreement.

The second useful thing about the meeting was that it bypassed the Congressional power structure. As usual, the quality of the comments got worse the closer you got to the party leadership. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, gave remarks that veered between the misleading and the incoherent. Statements from Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, were partisan spin. The Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, were smart enough to stand back and let Senator Lamar Alexander lead the way, which he did genially and intelligently. While Alexander was speaking, Reid and Pelosi wouldn’t even deign to look at him.

(More here.)