Yesterday's Health Care Summit

Despite my planned avoidance of yesterday's vaunted health care "summit," about which I wrote here, I actually ended up watching a fair amount of it. And participating in the live blog on Newt Gingrich's health care-related website.

Mind you, I didn't listen to or watch the entire proceedings. I mean, it's really unbearable and torturous to have to listen to Wonderboy and his Congressional minions lie through their teeth- as they did.

But I watched them enough to form the following impressions.

First, as confirmed by various sources, the Democrats did not give Republicans equal time. Congressional members of each party had about 119 minutes, or nearly 2 hours. But Wonderboy abrogated to himself another 2 hours, making it 2:1 for Democrats:Republicans.

Tactically, whenever Republicans were scoring heavily with telling remarks about Democratic chicanery, lies, or trickery, either Wonderboy, Biden or Harry Reid would cut them off. In one case, as the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel noted, when Paul Ryan, House Republican from Wisconsin, landed several direct blows to Wonderboy's plan, the president called an aide over to "confer," thus taking the camera off of Ryan.

Which brings me to my next impression. As several other pundits also have noted, Wonderboy managed to reinforce his slide from looking Presidential. Seated at the table, albeit the head of one side, with everyone else, he appeared to be trying to act as moderator. He would arrogantly state whether he thought someone had merely restated 'campaign talking points,' meaning a GOP speaker, or whether 'good points' had been made- by a Democrat, of course.

I should mention that, until it froze my browser and necessitated a reboot of my computer, the live blog on Gingrich's site was scrolling at a frenetic pace. The thousands who took part were something like 100:1 of the opinion that Wonderboy and his henchmen were putting on a show, without any actual intention of listening. They weren't fooled for a moment by his antics and arrogance.

In fact, many times bloggers chimed in about how arrogant, self-impressed and narcissistic the president was behaving. Next to that, a common theme was to vote every incumbent out of office and just start over in Congress with totally fresh faces. There was a lot of anger, mostly at Democrats.

They also nearly uniformly noticed something which I also observed, i.e., Democrats led with sob stories to make emotional demands for their bloated bill, while Republicans largely stuck to their own ideas, critiques of the bill, and demands for Democrats to swear off 'reconciliation' and start over together.

All in all, I think Wonderboy and his party made a serious mistake by holding the meeting. The Democrats merely confirmed their intransigence, refusal to listen to voters, and dedication to, as one pundit put it, "rule, rather than govern." Which was shown clearly in Wonderboy's self-anointed wrap-up, wherein he threatened that if the Republicans don't vote for this abomination, he will give his blessing to reconciliation in the Senate.

However, it's far from clear, to various pundits, that Reid can even get 51 votes. And, if he does, Frisco Nan can't, by Paul Ryan's counting, get anywhere close to a one-vote margin to pass anything. He said on CNBC that morning that the GOP believes the Democrats are as many as 20 votes short in the House.

Still, the GOP gave a much, much better and more coherent performance than I feared. Lamar Alexander, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Tom Coburn, John McCain and John Kyle all scored direct hits on Wonderboy and his flawed plans.

They forced the president to grimace at being criticized, corrected, shown his data were erroneous, and generally made him uncomfortable by being forced to listen to honest, forthright criticisms. He obviously didn't like it.

Oh, well. That's what a president gets when he chooses to leave the Oval Office and get down in the dirt with Congress to discuss legislative details in public.

Ronald Reagan would never have behaved so unwisely. He'd have had GOP legislators meet with Democrats privately, then perhaps join them. But he'd never lower himself to look like a high school debating team moderator.

My final comment is about my first impression of the seven hour gripe fest. As I watched Lamar Alexander make the GOP's opening remarks, I was struck by his focus on 'how bills are written and passed.' Alexander was a successful Tennessee elected official, governed the state, then ran for Senate. He's very experienced in governing. The wide gulf between him and the baby we have in the Oval Office was never more pronounced than when Alexander mused aloud how bi-partisan legislation had been written in past Congressional sessions.

It became clear that Wonderboy simply has no idea what he's doing. He's a novice who actually believes it's all about campaigning, speaking, and orating. But since he's never accomplished anything of note in his life, other than winning a Senate and a presidential campaign, he wouldn't have a clue as to how to govern the United States.

It surely showed yesterday, didn't it?