Live blog: Obama vs. the GOP

It is a small room with vaulted ceiling, distinctive chandelier. Windows were shuttered.

Name tags laid out for all the dignitaries, seated very closely to each other along tables formed into a square about 25 by 25 feet. Note pads and pencils provided to each, as well as a glass of water.

President will be seated in front of a fireplace."

President Obama and Vice President Biden, surrounded by agents and others, emerged from the White House gate at 9:58 AM.

President: "Hi, guys." Waves to pool. Biden waves, too.

Reporter: Comment to make?

President: "Looking forward to listening."

Reporter: Do you have a Plan B?

President: (Keeps walking, doesn't respond for a moment, then says) "I've always got plans."

But Obama countered him, again correctly, by pointing out that simply citing this statistic without further context is misleading. Alexander wasn't happy about being corrected in this way (to be fair, Obama wasn't exactly friendly during this exchange either) but Obama's right. Premiums would go up by that much, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. People would be paying more because they'd be getting more.

From the CBO report:

"Average premiums would be 27 percent to 30 percent higher because a greater amount of coverage would be obtained. In particular, the average insurance policy in this market would cover a substantially larger share of enrollees’ costs for health care (on average) and a slightly wider range of benefits. Those expansions would reflect both the minimum level of coverage (and related requirements) specified in the proposal and people’s decisions to purchase more extensive coverage in response to the structure of subsidies."

That 27 to 30 percent number drops to the 10 to 13 percent overall number because of offsetting provisions that would decrease the cost of coverage.

Hey, come on, this is TOTALLY relevant to healthcare reform.

You lie!

The healthcare legislation would, in contrast, make it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance -- rather than joining these haphazardly-funded and regulated risk pools.

McCain: "I'm reminded of that every day."

That's the kind of comment he was making at the Baltimore House GOP retreat, and it's the kind of comment that had Democratic operatives wondering where the White House had been hiding him since the 2008 campaign.

"Aside from the invited guests, there are about a dozen staffers in the room flanking the table. There was no sign of Rahm Emmanuel. (sic)

"There are also four television cameras in set positions. Two in the back of the room and one flanking each side. The pool is seated along the back wall.

"Some of the guests have open three-ring folders that outline the health care proposals including Dodd, whose doodles – drawn on the Blair House tablet provided to the guests – look like hieroglyphics.

"Most of the guests remained seated through the morning session. Boehner did leave briefly, from 11:32 a.m., returned at 11: 39 a.m.

"White House staff said that this was the first time Blair House has hosted such an historic summit. As to lunch, the president is expected to walk back across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The invited guests will be provided lunch in another room. White House staff did not know the menu but pledged to find out what was being served."

By the way, it's worth noting that the only Republican woman in the room, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, hasn't spoken yet. Whereas Democrats have featured Slaughter, Pelosi and Sebelius.

That's not to say they should work, just that they are working.

"I don't know if it's interesting watching it on TV, but it's interesting being part of Establishing there are some areas of real agreement, starting to focus on what the real disagreements are. If you look at the issue of how much government should be involved, the argument that Republicans are making really isn't that this is a government takeover of healthcare but rather that we're regulating the insurance market too much. That's a legitimate philosophical disagreement, we'll hopefully be able to explore it more in the afternoon."

Here in New York, we have Fox on. I'm thinking of starting a new drinking game: one shot every time a Fox anchor says "nuclear option." Of course, if we do that, I'll be drunk in 3 minutes.

The reconciliation bill would only be used to combine the House and Senate bills, in ways that just about everyone agrees would improve the final product -- taking out the "Cornhusker kickback" that Ben Nelson got, making it easier to afford the mandatory health insurance, easing the tax on high-value healthcare plans.

But that distinction will get lost, every time a Republican talks about the process, from now until the 2010 elections (and beyond).

* Not really.

As it happens, in order to attend the healthcare summit, McCain had to cancel his other plans for today -- a fundraiser sponsored by BGR PAC, which is the political action committee run by Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, a lobbying firm. And (maybe you can guess where this is going?) in 2006, the last year for which OpenSecrets.com lists records, PhRMA paid the lobbying firm $200,000.

That's not to say the deal PhRMA cut is any less unsavory; McCain is probably right to point out the problem. But he's not quite as pure on the issue as he'd like people -- especially people who vote in Republican primaries in Arizona -- to believe.

One of the mistakes the administration made early on was trying to work with insurers -- which deprived Obama of a natural villain to play against.

"Sen. Wyden spoke briefly with the pool. He said the morning session was a time to stake out positions and he hoped the afternoon would bring out ideas for compromise.

Sen. Rockefeller also spoke briefly to the pool where he defended the Democratic bills saying that the public does not have a clear sense of the details within the bill. He suggested that public displeasure mostly surrounded the 'sausage making' process that had stretched on longer than he preferred."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Pfotenhauer isn't impressed by Obama's performance today. A statement from her just landed in my inbox: "Away from his lectern and podium, President Obama looks as impatient in his seat as an 8-year-old boy in English class. Meanwhile, the Republican members of Congress have a fire in their bellies that, frankly, has been missing far too long from the GOP."

In fact, the reason insurers want to do this is so they can set up shop in the state that has the least amount of regulation governing what they must cover. But Blackburn is rolling along, and she shouldn't let reality get in her way.

Pool Q:
"Do you [think] the public option will come up at all today?"

Durbin A: "It might ... We've kind of been through this battle in the
Senate ... and you lose a handful of Democratic votes on the public
option." (Adds he supports public option)

Q: How do you think it's going?

A: "I think it's going well. The president is really doing his very best
to find some basic common ground ... He's identified some key
principles" where there is some agreement

Q: Any surprises so far?

A: "No. Working with these people for a long time, I could give some of
their speeches and they could give mine."

Q: Expect bipartisan deal to form? Are differences being bridged?
(Paraphrased, off mic)

A: "It's a longshot."
"It's possible."
"I'm glad the president is trying, the American people want him to try
to find some common ground ... I hope we get it done."

Pool Q: "What happens tomorrow?"

Durbin A: "If nothing comes of this we're going to press forward. We
just can't quit. This is a once in a political lifetime opportunity to
deal with a health care system that is really unsustainable ..."

Pool Q: Does reconciliation start tomorrow?

Durbin A: "I wouldn't go that far. We will sit down in leadership and if
we have some helpful Republicans, this could be an easy assignment. But
if not, it could be a little harder."

But he says there were two reasons he changed his mind. One, cost-shifting -- patients with insurance wind up paying extra money to cover the costs of treating patients without insurance, who hospitals must care for anyway. And two, because otherwise risk pools will shrink into the "death spiral" that Sebelius mentioned earlier. If you don't require everyone to buy insurance, the only people who do buy it will be the people who already know they need it. Which means they won't be able to afford it, and healthy people won't be able to afford it once they want it, either.

I'm now counting the seconds before Democrats remind reporters that Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan would replace Social Security with private vouchers to buy retirement investments.

Funny thing about that, by the way, is that it represents the Republicans accepting Obama's way of looking at this, which he laid out earlier: "There was an imbalance on the opening statements because I'm the president and so I made... I didn't -- I didn't count my time in terms of dividing it evenly."

Of course, the bill isn't a government takeover of healthcare, so while that may be true, it's also irrelevant.

(Only 85 of them voted against it, which mostly serves as a reminder of how few Republicans were in Congress in 1965. But the point, still, is that Medicare was carried legislatively by Democrats.)

Full disclosure, though it pains me -- I said Ryan was worth watching on that score, Mike said he wasn't, he was right. But watching this today, you really do have to think he could end up being a major figure in the GOP pretty soon, if not somewhere on a national ticket in 2012 or 2016. The fact that he's a pretty nondescript white guy from a blue state hurts him, but there are ways around that, and there are circumstances in which that could be advantageous for balancing out a ticket.

Just now, after interrupting Obama, he was red-faced and ready to pounce on the president. But Obama responded by saying he basically agreed with the point McCain made, leaving the senator totally flustered.

Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, is run by private health insurers. Democrats, and the White House, say cuts to that program can save money because the private insurers make money on it. Republicans appear to be either ignoring the distinction, or pretending that these private insurers are participating in a program even though they lose money on it.

Well, yeah. Because Boehner has no interest in agreement. Not saying that as a slam on him -- just reality. He and other Republicans have decided, and they may well be right, that it's politically much better for them to just fight against a bill rather than compromise on one.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Ryan Rudominer sends over some thoughts on that subject: "Representative John Boehner’s vote on whether to outlaw anti-competitive practices by big health insurance companies tells Ohio voters what he values more, protecting insurance company profits over helping his constituents afford health care. Considering that Boehner has received $939,276 from the insurance industry, a vote to let them keep manipulating the market to drive up their profits while families suffer is all the more outrageous.”

That may cover a fairly large number of the audience.

The appropriate response, of course, would be that if the people don't like this bill, they can vote out the people who supported it. Congress isn't required to abandon things just because polls show they're unpopular while they're working on it.

Here's a chart showing the spending per capita by nation. As you can see, the U.S. is by far the outlier.

"A number of Washington Democrats have railed against the notion that they should need 60 votes in the Senate to pass their government takeover of health care. The 60 vote threshold for moving forward with legislation in the Senate was devised to protect against the tyranny of the majority. It exists to ensure that legislation has widespread support before it is enacted.

"Now, a recent CNN poll shows that 73% of Americans want Congress to either start over on health care reform or drop the issue completely. In spite of such widespread opposition, Democrats are threatening to ram their bill through with the votes of just 50 Democrat Senators and Vice President Biden.

"That right there shows why the 60 vote threshold is necessary. It prevents blind partisanship from overriding the wishes of the American people."

The argument that the filibuster -- the RSC never uses that word, you'll notice, they call it "The 60 vote threshold for moving forward with legislation in the Senate," as if it's standard policy -- "was devised to protect against the tyranny of the majority" is basically right. But it's still not the greatest argument to make politically, considering that the filibuster has also been used in an attempt to protect and extend the tyranny of the majority. Two classic examples of the procedure, for instance, are the filibusters of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964.

Beyond that, the fact of the matter is that the underlying bill has already passed the Senate with 60 votes. Reconciliation, the procedure that prohibits filibusters and takes the Senate back to the days of the simple majority, will be used to pass fixes to that bill.

You can find plenty of people on the right who will disagree, of course, but everything I've seen on this so far indicates that non-partisan experts don't think those arguments are worth taking seriously.

There are 48 million people without insurance.

Free markets are exactly what got us to this crisis in health care so far, aren't they? The only part of the healthcare system people appear to love is the one run by the government: Medicare.

Speaking of which, can someone get me some coffee, please?

That is $17,000 -- or about 33 percent -- more than the median household income in the U.S., which is about $52,000.

But who says the GOP is the party of the wealthy?

At the same time, though, Democrats would be wise not to fall back on that reasoning. (Obama's not the only one I've seen pushing it today.) It's not those specific elements that people will be thinking about when they go vote; it's the broader picture. And if voters don't like the bill -- even if it's because they didn't really know what was in it -- then they'll vote against the people who supported it.

Now, reform supporters like Obama are using this argument to make a case for passing the bill. On the policy side, they're right -- the American people really do want much of what's in the White House proposal. But at this point in the process, the policy side of things matters much less than what individual members think about the politics of the bill and how they're likely to be affected politically.

Fortunately for Obama, of course, being president means you don't have to worry if anyone's still watching when you speak -- his remarks are guaranteed to be replayed later on.

There's little doubt that Democrats are ready to move ahead, with or without the GOP. Obama basically said he didn't mind dealing with the healthcare bill during the upcoming political season: "That's what elections are for." Republicans are already shrieking about reconciliation and process arguments. Will that message trump the stuff people actually do like in the healthcare bill?