Obama’s Health Care Summit: Center Stage for Bipartisanship, or Political Posturing?

ABC News' Kristina Wong reports: President Obama’s health care summit is this Thursday, and thanks to C-SPAN, Americans can watch the deliberations and decide for themselves whether the GOP is really the “Party of No,” and whether Democrats can meaningfully reach across the aisle to achieve reform. 

The meeting will also be an opportunity to see if Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh is right. Bayh announced last week he would not seek reelection because “there is too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving” in Congress.

But with both sides heading into the 2010 mid-term elections this fall, political partisanship may only get worse. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Sunday that he intends to be at the president’s summit "in good faith", over the weekend Dems and Republicans sounded as rigid as ever, disagreeing on health care reform, and how to stimulate economic growth, create jobs, and reduce the deficit.

Republican Indiana Congressman Mike Pence called the summit a "media event."

“If we were talking about really starting over with a clean piece of paper, scrapping the bills that have passed the House and the Senate and also renouncing the abuse of the legislative process known reconciliation, Republicans are ready to work.  But what we can't help but feel like here is the Democrats spell summit S-E-T-U-P.  And all this is going to be is some media event used as a preamble to shove through ‘Obamacare 2.0.’ And we're not going to have any of it,” Pence said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The American people are tired of the borrowing, the spending, the bailouts, the takeovers,” Pence said, “I honestly believe the American people are going to take back the American Congress and put Republicans back in control this fall.”

Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, said Republicans are playing political games.

“The first nine months of the Obama administration were one of the most productive periods in recent legislative history according to all independent outside observers,” Van Hollen said on NBC. “Then we came to the health care debate.  Senator DeMint famously said, ‘We are going to use this to break the president.  It is going to be his Waterloo.’  Just last week we had seven Republican senators who had their names on a bill to create a deficit reduction commission vote against it for purely partisan reasons.” 

The tone was just as acrimonious from some governors who attended the National Governors Association Winter Meeting in Washington this weekend.  Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, called the stimulus a failure.

“I don't disagree that we need to do things to stimulate and grow the economy, but the way to do that is to take the tax code and extend the Bush tax cuts, cut the payroll tax, encourage growth in the private economy by reducing capital gains burdens. Don't put more burdens on the economy like this grotesque health care bill.  Don't put on cap and trade legislation.  Don't do card check. So the stimulus bill, as a concept, you know, stimulating the economy is a good idea, but they did it the wrong way.  They should have done it through things that would stimulate private sector growth," Pawlenty said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Democratic Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm defended the stimulus bill.

“For Michigan, it's 42,000 people who are working today who wouldn't be otherwise working.  And across the country it's 2 million. So if we didn't have the stimulus — I mean, remember what it was like when he took office — 750,000 jobs lost in the month that he took office,” Granholm said on FOX. 

Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger voiced surprisingly strong support for the stimulus bill.

“I have been the first governor of the Republican governors to come out and to support the stimulus money because I say to myself, this is terrific, and anyone that says that it hasn't created the jobs, they should talk to the 150,000 people that have been getting jobs in California,” Schwarzenegger said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“I think it's kind of politics, rather than thinking about only one thing, and this is how do we support the president, how do we support him and do everything that we can in order to go and stimulate the economy, get the economy back, and think about the people rather than politics,” said Schwarzenegger, who is not seeking reelection for governor.

Pawlenty acknowledged that Republicans needed to put forth ideas, instead of attacking the Democrats.

“We need to be not just the party of saying ‘We hope President Obama continues to kick it in the dugout.’ That's not a strategy, that's not a plan, that's not a vision for the future.  We also have to offer our own ideas and alternatives to solve and address these needs,” Pawlenty said.

Former Secretary of State under Republican President George W. Bush Colin Powell said Washington wasn’t broken, but in “disarray.”

“Our system is not broken.  It's a great system.  But it's in some disarray right now.  And the American people are looking for their leaders to fix it.  They're looking for the White House to fix it.  And they're looking for leaders in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the House and Senate to start finding ways to compromise and get the country moving and not just scream at each other,” Powell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

But McConnell insisted it’s not politics but the president’s policies that are causing Republican resistance.

“Look, with regard to the stimulus, I think the evidence is pretty clear.  You know, Tiger Woods and John Edwards had a better year than the stimulus did,” McConnell said.

“What we are not willing to cooperate in doing is passing this massive overhaul of health care and passing this massive energy tax. Beyond that, there's been a high level of cooperation, by the president's own words and by Senator Reid's own words, and we'll continue to cooperate on those things that we think are in the best interests of the American people.”