Republicans Skeptical of Health Care Summit

WASHINGTON (Feb. 8) – President Barack Obama's invitation to a bipartisan health care summit televised live from the White House may be an offer Republicans wish they could refuse.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea," Republican strategist Greg Crist, a veteran of Capitol Hill policy wars, told AOL News. "If you don't want health reform or if Republicans don't want what the president is pushing, now is not the time to engage on that."

The president's pre-Super Bowl surprise, announced during an interview with CBS's Katie Couric, is aimed at moving the ball down the field on an issue that has been in time-out since Massachusetts voters chose Republican Scott Brown to fill Edward Kennedy's seat in the Senate.

The half-day session scheduled for Feb. 25 is Obama's answer to Republican demands that their ideas be heeded in shaping a health care bill. It's also an acknowledgment that he needs more than Democratic votes if he ever wants to see legislation land on his desk.

The purpose of the summit is to "ensure that the president signs the best bill possible and to ensure that Americans know what's in the reform proposals being discussed. The meeting is two weeks away and we're not going to prejudge what's going to happen. It's going to be a substantive discussion about serious proposals," a White House official said. "Participants can approach it in whatever spirit they like – but we expect that this is going to be about policy, not politics."

Republican leaders accepted the offer, with caveats.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell welcomed the chance to meet but said real progress is possible only if the White House "can start by shelving the current health spending bill."

House Minority Leader John Boehner and Republican Whip Eric Cantor went further, raising the issue of Obama's sincerity in a letter to the White House that posed a series of questions about the ground rules for the meeting.

"Your answers to these critical questions will help determine whether this will be a truly open, bipartisan discussion or merely an intramural exercise before Democrats attempt to jam through a job-killing health care bill that the American people can't afford and don't support," they wrote. " 'Bipartisanship' is not writing proposals of your own behind closed doors, then unveiling them and demanding Republican support."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs responded that the president "looks forward" to reviewing GOP proposals. "He's open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny. What he will not do, however, is walk away from reform and the millions of American families and small business counting on it."

A senior Democratic aide said Republicans "keep on coming up with excuses." He said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats want to find agreement in a public sit-down – the idea came up Thursday in a meeting between Obama and Democratic leaders – "but we are not going to pretend that this whole process didn't happen" and chuck the House and Senate bills altogether.

"It doesn't look serious because the president's advisers say they are coming in with a 90 percent-baked product and are asking Republicans to sign on after a few concessions," said John Ullyot, a former Senate GOP spokesman. "That's not a serious negotiation."

Whether either side will budge from their entrenched positions when the cameras go live remains to be seen.

"It can just be political theater or it could be a policy breakthrough. It really could go either way," Democratic strategist Doug Hattaway told AOL News.

For Democrats, the summit is "an opportunity to reframe this debate, but they do have to get their act together better because of the divisions within the party," he said. "This will put Republicans on the spot to put up or shut up."

John Pitney, a former House Republican aide who now teaches at Claremont McKenna College in California, agrees that Obama is trying to force GOP leaders to play defense. Although the session will include Democrats, Pitney said Obama may be hoping for a replay of the favorable reviews he got after his "question time" debate with House Republicans in Baltimore last month.

"Substantively, it means nothing. This is a public relations exercise," Pitney said. "This is really not about policy. It's about messaging. The Democrats are hoping the message is that if people see the choice between the Democratic plan and the Republican plan, that they'll opt for the Democratic plan."

But, he added, given the sharp divide on health care between left-leaning Democrats and centrists facing tough re-election battles next fall, "unless they're working from a pretty tight script, the danger is they could step on their own lines," he said.

Ron Bonjean, who worked for Republican leaders in the House and Senate, said the summit is Obama's "last stand" on health care given a fractious Democratic caucus that can't agree on a bill.

"They're trying to change the public narrative to one where the Republicans are at fault for not moving the agenda forward," he said in an interview with AOL News.

He doubts the move will succeed given the "hundreds of speeches and interviews" Obama has given on health care that have yet to sway public opinion his way. "It's hard to see how one event will be pivotal in changing the political winds for November," he said.

Yet Bonjean and other GOP strategists are acutely aware of the optical risks after the Baltimore forum. "The best strategy for Republicans is to demand that they have a say in how the event is set up and how it is staged," he said. The best format? "A roundtable setting where everybody's equal" instead of a stage and podium from which the president can command the debate.

Bonjean expects the next few weeks will see round-the-clock negotiations on the format as intense as that before a televised presidential debate.

Obama commands what President Theodore Roosevelt once called "the bully pulpit" and it's one that can make Republicans look small by comparison, Ullyot said.

Then, echoing Republican calls to go back to square one on health care, he said: "Unless the president is willing to show good faith and really start afresh, incorporating the best ideas from both parties, this will be a well-attended stunt but won't go toward getting a solution."