A plugged-in friend emails:

I think the Obama administration’s blow-up wasn’t about the “insult” at all. That was just a convenient excuse. The issue is that Obama has zero to show for his first year in office in the foreign policy realm. His one arguable success is the proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority  (even if I’d call it a self-inflicted failure created by his outrageous public scolding of Israel in May 2009 on a total settlement freeze that limited PA chief Mahmoud Abbas’ ability to maneuver). The Palestinians are constantly — and tactically — looking for any excuse to walk away from  negotiations to cause Israel to better its offer. When the housing announcement was made during the Biden visit last week, the Arab League jumped all over the State Department and the Obama people saw the entire Mitchell “proximity talks” project as being at risk.  The wild overreaction was a deliberate effort to shock the Israelis to make more concessions, of course, but more so to impress upon the Arab League that it should not withdraw its support for the proximity talks. A tactically foolish approach, as it will hurt, not help, forward movement on the talks — which will go nowhere soon anyway. But not just a fit of pique.

Americans, it is said, don’t care about political procedure — how the House and Senate do things. That’s true. But they’re about to. If, indeed, Nancy Pelosi and Louise Slaughter and the Democrats actually attempt to declare the health-care bill law without its having been voted on, there is going to be a massive populist revolt. That’s not because Republicans will gin one up. It’s because there’s a cultural provenance here.

Everyone between the ages of 35 and 50 in this country probably saw, as a kid, this – I’m Just a Bill — a three-minute-long Saturday-morning cartoon that ran on ABC intermittently for several years. And everybody over the age of 50 probably has an atavistic memory of some “How a Bill Becomes Law” moment in a civics class (they don’t teach such irrelevant matters any longer, I gather). The single thing nonpolitical people may know about legislation is that Congress has to vote on it before the president signs it. The fundamental breach that is under discussion right now, even if it’s been done in minor ways before, is exactly the sort of political action that can explode outward in a million ways, and I suspect that even Nancy Pelosi is aware of the kind of damage she is going to inflict on herself and her own party if she attempts it. Which is why she is going to spend the rest of the week strong-arming Democratic House members any way she can, as Yuval Levin explores here. That, too, presents its own kind of peril, because there is no way the deals she has struck will remain hidden from view, and every one of them will be used as a weapon against her, the Democrat who was bribed, and the party as a whole.

There will be a lull right after President Obama signs it, as the media drop consideration of the controversy to discuss just how historic the historic nature of the historic legislation is, historically speaking, in historic terms … and then Congress will return home for the Easter recess on March 26, and all hell will break loose.

In both politics and diplomacy, actors must think at least one move ahead. They need to be reasonably sure that when they say or do A, then the other party will say or do B. And they should want the other party to say or do B, otherwise it makes no sense to say A in the first place. The purpose of action isn’t just to act, in other words, but to make sure that the reaction you get advances your purposes and your interests.

Which is why the administration’s behavior in deepening and perpetuating its latest confrontation with Israel is actually rather bewildering. Let’s start out by acknowledging that what happened during Vice President Biden’s trip last week — the announcement of new housing starts in East Jerusalem — was an affront to the United States. I believe Israel has every right to do what it is doing, but the view of the visiting representative of the administration is that what it is doing is wrong and injurious to future prospects for peace, and this conflict of visions is not going to be resolved. Biden was embarrassed, his visit overshadowed, and expressions of diplomatic dismay appropriate as a result. The Israeli prime minister, who did not know about the announcement, apologized to the visitor, and was embarrassed as well by the way in which the dysfunctional Israeli political system was exposed to international view.

To finish reading this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive, click here.

A few days ago, I called attention to a quote from one of the creators of a new musical called Signs of Life, which is set in and around the Thereseinstadt concentration camp. (I compared it to The Producers, and specifically to “Springtime for Hitler,” the musical-within-the-musical, described by its deranged creator as “a gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.”) The quote in question averred that the questions about Nazi era Germans and how they responded to their leaders had a great deal to teach us about America over the past decade — an observation of which the best that can be said is that it is a bit more tasteful than the very notion of a musical set at Thereseinstadt.

The writers and creators of Signs of Life, evidently thrilled that anybody is willing to write about them at all, have fired a broadside at me using the old “how can he criticize our show without seeing it” gambit:

You are well-known as a protector of the memory of the Holocaust and as someone who, by his own admission, knows “the lyrics to every show tune ever written.” We were therefore dismayed to read your post on Commentary about our new off-Broadway musical, Signs of Life. Your casually insulting aside about the “wonderfully tuneful” quality of the show-which as far as we can tell you have not seen-is irresponsible enough, but to make the ugly accusation that we believe “the Holocaust exists as a dramatic trope to teach us lessons about America in the age of Bush” is contemptible.

The characters in our show must participate in the Nazi propaganda machine in order to survive; when they realize the implications of their participation they face ethical choices that endanger their lives. But the obligation of citizens across the political spectrum to question our leaders and evaluate the truth of their answers did not end on V-Day.

The idea you seem to advocate-that if you put an event as vastly horrific as the Holocaust onstage you should do it as a museum piece, rather than exploring what we might learn from it about human nature-implies that today’s society is no longer capable of a Holocaust, which is a position both false and dangerous.

We would like to invite you to see Signs of Life and to judge based on experience rather than distortion and mockery whether our show honors the memory of those slaughtered in the Holocaust. Please e-mail us and we’ll arrange tickets for whatever date you’d like.

Now, while I do place myself very much on the anti side on the admittedly complex aesthetic question of using the Holocaust as an artistic setting — and, not incidentally, on the anti side when it comes to the use of the musical form as a vehicle for the serious treatment of just about any topic, notwithstanding my deep love of musicals and the American songbook they created — that wasn’t the reason I wrote the item. I wrote the item because of something the show’s composer, Joel Derfner, said. Which was this: “The message of our show is not ‘Killing Jews is bad.’ It’s: ‘What do you do when you find out you’ve been lied to? What is telling the truth worth?’ In the last 30 years this question has been vital to American life and especially so in the last nine years.”

Now let’s parse this. What happened 30 years ago in this country? Ronald Reagan’s election. What happened nine years ago? George W. Bush’s inauguration. Who’s making repulsive and unwarranted associations now? The Signs of Life team is right that someone said something contemptible, but it wasn’t I.

And thanks for the invitation, but I’ll pass; I already did my time years ago when, courtesy of P.J. O’Rourke, who secured it from God-knows-where, I once read the entirety of the screenplay for the Jerry Lewis epic, The Day the Clown Cried.

New York Governor David Paterson attempted to suppress an investigation into an aide’s alleged beating of said aide’s girlfriend, and lied to an ethics panel about the free tickets he scored to the World Series. In this, he follows Eliot Spitzer, whom he succeeded after Spitzer attempted to convince a banker to contravene federal banking laws (that is actually why he had to resign, not because he hired a prostitute, but since prosecutors decided for unclear reasons not to indict him, that part is forgotten). Paterson, in his sure-to-fail attempt to hold on to power for a few more months, just secured the critical moral and ethical support of none other than Al Sharpton, who is to ethics as oil is to water.

But let’s get back to Spitzer, who has been working to stage a comeback of sorts, writing in Slate and appearing on TV and in general acting like an eminence grise of some kind. The New York Times reports that a New York lawyer of my acquaintance, Lloyd Constantine, has written a book about his experience as one of Spitzer’s lieutenants and confidants called A Journal of the Plague Year. Word about the book and its unvarnished portrait of Spitzer’s decline and fall was greeted violently by Spitzer, who issued the following statement to the Times:

What Mr. Constantine has written is little more than a self-serving and largely inaccurate interpretation of events mixed with unfounded speculation. That such a close adviser and confidant of my family and member of my administration would choose to write such a book is a fundamental breach of trust.

Let’s not mince words here. Eliot Spitzer has a personality disorder. Lloyd Constantine is a very, very rich man, an anti-trust lawyer who secured a massive judgment in a case a few years ago against Visa and Mastercard that netted him, personally, in excess of $100 million. He didn’t need to write a book for money, and for that matter, he didn’t need to shlep up to Albany to help his old friend Spitzer out when Eliot became governor. The “fundamental breach of trust” here was Spitzer’s, not Constantine’s. Spitzer is the one who made a mockery out of his governorship, who brought shame on everyone who ever worked for him or gave him money or voted for him.

His breathtakingly self-righteous response to the fact that someone has had the nerve to write a book about the horrific experience of serving as Spitzer’s underling reveals that his troubles have taught Spitzer nothing and improved him not a whit. Constantine’s flaw was not in writing about Spitzer after the fact, but in failing to see before the fact Spitzer’s disgusting conduct in the years before he ran for governor — using his powers as the state’s attorney general in inappropriate ways and, when criticized for doing so, threatening his critics with ruination and destruction for having the temerity to cross him — offered every indication of the genuinely bad character that would be revealed during his disastrous and blessedly brief tenure. And that he is still revealing now. And that his choice of David Paterson as running mate revealed as well. And that Paterson’s scurrying behind the legs of Al Sharpton reveals about him.

With my friend Yuval Levin, than whom no one seems more able to maintain a grasp on the slippery thread of this business, I’ve been trying to work through just what exactly the procedure for a successful health-care vote is. It would seem to be this (and don’t blame Yuval if I get any of this wrong).

Stage 1. The House of Representatives must now pass the Senate bill, which passed in December. In so doing, it will effectively be voiding its own bill, which was passed with a 5-vote margin in early November — because none of the  goodies and bargains House members negotiated among themselves are present in the Senate bill. Specifically, there’s no “public option” in the Senate bill, as there is in the House bill; and there’s no “Stupak amendment” forbidding the use of public funds for abortion in the Senate bill. That amendment was necessary for House Democratic leaders to secure its five-vote victory in November.

Ordinarily, the House and Senate bills would go to a conference committee, which would negotiate over the differences in them, combine them into a single bill, and send that new bill back to both chambers for a final vote. This single bill would be considered a new piece of legislation, and therefore would have to be voted on again by everybody. Once that is done, the single bill would go to the president’s desk for signature.

But because of Scott Brown’s election, there are no longer 60 votes in the Senate for a health-care bill—and 60 votes are needed in the Senate to end discussion of a bill and bring it to a vote. Without 60 votes bringing the discussion to “cloture,” a bill can remain open for debate forever in the process called “filibustering.” So there can’t be a health-care bill if the Senate has to take up a new version of it, because any new version will be fillibustered by Republicans.

So the House has to vote on the Senate bill to avoid another vote in the Senate. For then there is a single piece of legislation all tied up in a bow that doesn’t have to go to committee.

So why doesn’t that just happen?

Well, if there is to be a health-care bill, it will happen. The House will have to vote through the Senate bill without changing it. That’s just the reality. But that’s only going to happen if House members are promised that some of their concerns are taken into consideration. And so there will have to be a second bill. Immediately afterward. A second bill that fixes what’s wrong with the first bill. And this is where all this talk about “reconciliation” comes in.

Stage 2. Reconciliation. The second bill will function as a series of amendments to and fixes of the first bill. Now, ordinarily, that  should kill the whole process outright, because the same problems the first bill faced should apply to a second bill in the Senate—the need for 60 votes to close debate, etc. But that wouldn’t be the case if the second bill is treated as a “reconciliation” measure. A reconciliation measure is a the only one in the Senate that bypasses the 60-vote cloture rule and allows a simple majority vote. Keith Hennessey describes it thus:

A reconciliation bill is a special type of bill.  The full name is a “budget reconciliation” bill.  It’s purpose is to combine into one bill the work of multiple committees that are changing federal spending and tax laws.  It is an incredibly powerful tool that bypasses [unlimited debate and cloture] but only for very limited purposes.  Senators, and the Senate as a whole … allow these rules to be bypassed only for a specific purpose.

The use of “reconciliation” to pass health-care measures would be unprecedented. And there are real questions about whether the parliamentarian of the Senate will be able, even bending so far over he turns himself into a pretzel, to say that a vote on (for example) stripping abortion coverage from the bill fits the legal definition of what “reconciliation” is.

But forget that for a second. Let’s assume the Senate parliamentarian is entirely pliable. A reconciliation bill will be written. What then?

Stage 3. The House takes all the heat. Ah. Here’s the rub. It appears that, in an effort to make this as easy as possible on the Senate, the House is now under pressure from the Senate and the White House to vote for the reconciliation bill before the Senate. At which point the Senate will take it up and ramrod through the second bill with 51 votes, Obama signs it, and there’s health-care.

This strategy requires the House not only to vote for a wildly unpopular bill once, but then to vote on its sequel almost immediately afterward. In other words, House members are going to be forced to cast two wildly unpopular, highly visible votes in succession, without anybody else taking the heat. And there is going to be deal-making and back-scratching and all manner of sleazy behavior to achieve it, all of which will just increase the public sense of a corrupt process that has ensnared Democrats just as corruption seemed to ensnare Republicans in 2006. All so the Senate can sneak it through. And the House has good reason not to trust that the Senate will hold to its part of the bargain. What if there is a colossal meltdown in public support just before the reconciliation vote? What if the Senate decides to change it a little and throws it all back into chaos again? What if House members were to cast two votes and there was no health care at the end of the process?

The only thing that can make this insane business tolerable or bearable for House Democrats is geniune conviction —  conviction that this is the once-in-a-lifetime chance to put the country on the glidepath to a national health-care system. That is what can make the process seem to transcend the sleazy deals and buyoffs for those who are going to have to face voters and explain themselves and their votes.

So if, in the end, this process works as the White House wants it to work, it will do so because of core Democratic and liberal beliefs. Republicans and conservatives need to understand that; the political horror faced by every Democrat who does not have an entirely safe seat can be mitigated in part by the belief that there may be enough Democrats who can live their lives proud to have brought this measure to fruition.

Thus, the best hope of derailing health care will not derive from high motives – stopping this dreadful measure before it becomes law — but rather very low motives —sheer, panicked self-preservation on the part of Democratic pols hoping against hope to hold on in spite of the looming Republican wave.

I’m sure you’re looking forward to the new off-Broadway musical, “Signs of Life,” which offers what promises to be a wonderfully tuneful look at the Thereseinstadt concentration camp. But it turns out, according to tomorrow’s New York Times, that the musical really isn’t about the Holocaust after all, which is probably a wise thing, since The Producers got there first with its signature number, “Springtime for Hitler.” No, it turns out, the Holocaust exists as a dramatic trope to teach us lessons about America in the age of Bush:

That show, which had its premiere on Thursday, centers on Lorelei, an artist who agrees to create pretty pictures of the camp for Nazi propaganda but who, with other prisoners, schemes to get her drawings of the real horrors to the outside world.

“The message of our show is not ‘Killing Jews is bad,’ ” Mr. Derfner said. “It’s: ‘What do you do when you find out you’ve been lied to? What is telling the truth worth?’ In the last 30 years this question has been vital to American life and especially so in the last nine years.”

No, this is not, as they say, from The Onion.

“Where are we now?” This seems to be the question in the wake of yesterday’s health-care summit. The scenarios going forward indicate the amazing political condundra facing the president and his party.

1) Pass the health-care bill without Republican support. Well, OK, but which bill and how? The House has already passed a bill. In order to secure passage, which came with just a margin of five votes, House leaders agreed to remove abortion coverage from it (the so-called Stupak amendment). Now, try to follow this. The bill that has been voted out of the Senate committee for consideration of the full Senate features abortion coverage. Republicans have enough votes to filibuster this bill. That’s why there’s talk of passing it through the process called “reconciliation,” which needs only 51 votes, which Democrats have.

2) Make the House vote for the Senate bill. The way to muscle this legislation into law is for the House to give up its bill, bring the Senate bill (after it’s passed with 51 votes) up for a vote, pass it, and have Obama sign it. But here’s the thing. The Senate bill doesn’t have the Stupak amendment, so the dozen or so House Democrats who insisted on taking abortion out of the bill so that they could vote for it face a terrible choice. They will either have to vote for it and betray their principles and their voters and the fight they waged before. Or they can say no and risk torpedoing the bill.

It’s even more interesting than that, because three votes for the bill will not be recorded for it the next time it comes up — one due to death (John Murtha), two due to resignations (Neil Abercrombie and Robert Wexler). So what will House Democratic leaders do? They can try to put the arm on leftist Democrats who resisted voting for the original bill on the grounds it didn’t go far enough. In which case, they can win this.

Ah, but here’s the rub. They can’t possibly believe that the political situation last fall, when the House voted for its version of the bill, is the same today. Every House member is up for re-election, and polling suggests a catastrophe in the making for Democrats, in part due to the meltdown in support for health-care legislation (now 25 percent, according to CNN this week). Pelosi and Co. surely know they will not get  every single one of the 215 votes they scored last time (absent the Stupak dozen). They may be grasping at straws, but simple survival instinct will cause a major panic at the prospect of having to cast this vote. And there’s no knowing what people will do in a panic except that they will try at all cost to save their own skins.

3) Let it die in committee. Even if the Senate does pass the bill through the 51-vote reconciliation process — a big “if,” because it will ignite a major populist revolt that could have terrible consequences for Democrats in shaky Senate seats up for re-election in November —  the combination of bad poll numbers and the Stupak problem probably mean that the “pass the Senate bill” option is off the table, and so the normal Washington process will go forward. House and Senate negotiators will have to meet to harmonize their two bills. They will then agree on a single unitary piece of legislation. That unitary piece of legislation must then go back to the full House and the full Senate for final passage, at which point it is sent to the president, who can sign it into law.

The chances this will happen are increasingly remote. The attempt to pass the harmonized bill would reignite every firestorm over health care, at a time when support is only likely to decline still further. Tea Parties would erupt. Republicans will build forts with the 2,000-page bills and stack them to the inside of the Capitol Dome. Avoiding this horror show is the reason for the “pass the Senate bill” strategy. Democrats cannot allow it to happen. It would be best, at that point, to let the bill die in committee, with serious claims that the differences between the bills just couldn’t be breached. That will look terrible, but it’s the better of the two options.

4) The suicide mission. If the health-care bill collapses, the Obama presidency will be dealt a staggering blow from which it could recover, I would guess, only with a really extraordinary economic turnaround. The political calamity for Democrats in November will still take place; the president will lose the entirety of his capital with elected officials in his party; the media, sniffing a loser, will turn slowly but surely on him; and the conviction inside his own camp that he can work wonders with his silver-tongued patter will dissipate, causing a complete crisis of confidence inside the White House.

It would be better for him, unquestionably, for the legislation to pass, as a practical political matter. One could argue that the fate of his party really does rest on Obama’s shoulders, so it would be better for Democrats as well. But not for individual Democrats. So what happens if the Obama-Pelosi-Reid strategy for health-care passage is an order to House Democrats to carry out a suicide mission? That is hard to say. ObamaCare is the Democratic object of desire. One imagines that even those Democrats who don’t want to vote for it support it in their heart of hearts. So perhaps they can be appealed to on the grounds of liberal principle.

I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like this in American political history. Every way you look at it, Democrats are boxed in, forced to choose between extraordinarily unattractive options. What makes it especially noteworthy is that this was a calamity they summoned entirely upon themselves.

“I suspect that if the Democrats and the administration were willing to start over and then adopt John Boehner’s bill we’d get a whole bunch of Republican votes.” Well, that’s true. “The concern colleagues…on the Democratic side have is after a year and a half, or five decades, they think starting over means not doing much or doing the proposal John Boehner and other Republicans find acceptable…”

“I’ve put on the table some things that I’ve said I’d work on.” Not sure what that means.

“I’d like the Republicans to do a little soul searching and see if there’s something that you’d embrace dealing with 30 million uninsured people and pre-existing conditions…” The non-Democratic proposals attempt to change the way health care is delivered, and in that way would deal with these matters in that fashion, as he knows.

“Politically speaking there may not be a reason for Republicans not to do anything…most Republican voters are opposed to this bill and might be opposed to any compromise we could craft.” God forbid they should be represented in this debate!

“But I thought it was worthwhile to make this effort….If we saw movement — signficant movement, not just gestures — you wouldn’t need to start over because everybody knows what the issues are…” This is exactly the point; the Democratic bills are the ones that matter, not any Republican proposals.

“We cannot have another year-long debate about this…Is there enough serious effort so that in a month’s time, or six weeks time, we can make a deal or we’ll have to go forward….That’s what elections are for.” And so, at the end, Obama threatens Republicans with passage of the bill through the “reconciliation” process that will only require 51 Senate votes rather than 60. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that the House bill passed by only 5 votes and we don’t know yet whether Nancy Pelosi could command a majority for final passage for this bill when many prognosticators are looking at Democratic losses in the House of a minimum of 35-40 seats and a maximum of 75-80, more than Republicans lost after Watergate…

“Insuring those 30 million, that’s gonna take some money.” Imagine that Obama had acknowledged this last year. He couldn’t, of course, because he wanted to reserve soak-the-rich tax increases for other things.

The president says things that aren’t in the Republican plan are very popular. This is a very common liberal talking point; bloggers like Ezra Klein constantly point out that the “public option” is very popular. Well, if these ideas are popular, why is the Democratic plan garnering only 25 percent support? And if the “public option” is so popular, why is Obama’s chief talking point that there is no government takeover of health care and he shares so much common ground with Republicans?

The reason is that they are not popular, not really. Doubtless, if these various proposals could be magically imposed with no cost, no one would object and everybody would be happy. But the idea that you can give something for nothing is something the public does not believe in — and since most of these efforts involve insuring the uninsured, the already-insured have every reason to fear that the cost of such efforts is going to be imposed on them. The health-care bill began to falter due to the claim that Obama and friends could insure 30 million people and not increase costs.

In the end, though, what is being debated is not some putative Republican proposal. There are two bills, a Senate bill yet to pass and a House bill that has already passed. They were written by Democrats, and moved ahead by Democrats. Those bills are the issue, and they belong to Obama and his party, and they are loaded with things that frighten the public, and the only real question now is whether they will be jammed through.

The president begins to sum up, praising the “extraordinarily civil tone, and the fact that we’re only an hour late…” He promises to do so in 10 minutes.

Jonathan Chait writes:

John Podhoretz calls Obama “startlingly condescending at moments.” How can that be avoided when you’re trying to have a high-level discussion with people who reply either on debunked claims at best and talk radio-level slogans at worst?

Here’s how. By not being condescending. That’s how.

Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra to Republican Rep. Paul Ryan: “You called into question the Congressional Budget Office! … We have to decide, do we agree with the Congressional Budget Office or not?”

Ryan: “I did not call into question the Congressional Budget Office!”

They actually have an interesting dispute about the way the CBO “scores” the effect of a health-care bill on the budget deficit long term. But it’s still funny.

UPDATE: Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley: “I see the CBO as God.”

Biden is speaking.

And speaking.

And speaking. “Medicare. It’s an entitlement. It exists. It has to be dealt with. … I’d like us to talk about if we can what do we do about bending the cost curve … and uh …”

Obama, who’s sitting next to his vice president, looks a little bit like he wants to give him a zetz.

Finally, Mitch McConnell interrupts Biden and throws it to Rep. Paul Ryan, saving the nation.

I wrote earlier about differences in perception owing to ideology by citing Jonathan Chait of the New Republic. Now Yuval Levin, who has written about health care for COMMENTARY and is the editor of the wonderful National Affairs, offers his view at the Corner:

An important part of the Democrats’ problem is that Obama himself is their only star, and this format is not working for him. He certainly seems engaged and well informed (even given a few misstatements of fact, at least one of which John Kyl made very clear.) But he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States—more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is “a legitimate argument” is a way to avoid having an argument. He is diminished by the circumstances, he’s cranky and prickly when challenged, and he’s got no one to help him.

Yuval and I are in agreement about Obama’s professorial mien, which he calls “patronizing” and I called “condescending.” But I still think Obama comes across well on balance. And yet, thinking a little more about the peculiarity of Democrats talking so sweetly about how little difference there is between them and the Republicans, I am beginning to think Yuval has it right that “it is hard to see how the Democrats are doing themselves anything but harm with the health-care summit.”

This whole thing was a terrific blunder, probably, because with their own proposals’s support sinking and their own case for those proposals being made so haphazardly and disingenuously, Democrats are strengthening rather than weakening the Republican argument that the whole thing needs to be thrown out — because if Republicans disagree with them, and Republicans have more credibility on this right now, their judgment will more closely track with the public’s. And therefore, should Democrats decide to muscle their legislation through, they will all but ensure a voter uprising.

“And yet,” says Tom Harkin, “we still allow segregation in America today on the basis of your health.” Now that’s what I call a non-sequitur.

Tom Harkin, the Democratic senator from Iowa, says he’s stunned to discover how Democrats and Republicans “may be closer together” than we thought. In saying this, he is echoing something Democrats, including Obama, have been saying all day. Indeed, when Republicans like John McCain and Eric Cantor disagree and say the differences are far more substantive, these are the moments that have triggered the president’s anger. Fascinating. Democrats are seeking to turn around their fortunes on health care by hugging the GOP. It’s one of the more peculiar political strategies in memory, but when you’re at 25 percent, it might be worth a shot. A long shot, but a shot. A very long shot.

Thank God for the performance of Louise Slaughter, the Democratic representative, for injecting a note of reality into these proceedings — the reality being that members of Congress often grab the microphone to tell ridiculous stories about their constituents. In her case it was something about someone in her district who was wearing her sister’s dentures.

My sense of this summit is that President Obama is exactly as he always is — extremely intelligent, knowledgeable about policy details, so certain of the rightness of his views that he has no compunction about declaring the views of his antagonists to be merely politically convenient rather than substantive, startlingly condescending at moments, and even more startlingly long-winded when he gets going. As a result, he both looks good and bad in these settings — good because he’s serious and doesn’t appear to be a fanatic, and bad because of the condescension.

Then I turn to the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait and I read this:

Most [of] the time, this is like watching Lebron James play basketball with a bunch of kids who got cut from the 7th grade basketball team. He’s treating them really nice, letting his teammates take shots and allowing the other team to try to score. Nice try on that layup, Timmy, you almost got it on. But after a couple minutes I want him to just grab the ball and dunk on these clowns already.

So here we have a sterling example of how ideological predilections, his and mine, might color our opinions here. Except for one thing: You can only think Obama is Lebron James playing 7th graders if you are already certain his opinions are right, because the best you can say about this summit so far for him is that it’s a draw, and it’s probably worse than that. And given that only 25 percent of the public wants ObamaCare, he needs to be Lebron James. And Pete Maravich. And Oscar Robertson. And Kareem. All at the same time.

Obama says you won’t be forced into another program because “your plan will be grandfathered in.” That’s preposterous. Employer-sponsored plans change every year as insurers and employers grapple with how best to deal with growing costs.

His plan is more expensive. “So yes, I’m paying 13 percent more, but it’s for an apple, not for an orange. They’re two different plans.” There’s the hit-job commercial commercial right there. “13 percent more…13 percent more…13 percent more…” For the 280 million Americans with health-care coverage, health care is an issue because costs are increasing and the care may not be portable.

Obama declares that government control of health care is “not the issue.” He’s right. It’s one of the issues.

Max Baucus, the Montana Democratic senator, responds to the need for tort reform by pointing out that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius is working to come up with ways to end lawsuits “before they become bad lawsuits.” Doubtless there is a policy he is referring to here, but what on earth can an executive-branch official do on a matter that involves law — which is written by the legislative branch and adjudicated by the judicial branch? Baucus is attempting to make the case that the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not that serious, but his response is not a serious one.

One wonders, watching Steny Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat and House Majority Leader, what the last year would have been like for Democrats had he been the face of the party in the House rather than Nancy Pelosi. Hoyer is an extraordinarily intelligent politician and a fluid speaker, and sounds reasonable even when the policies he is advancing are less so. He would have not have become the lightning rod that Nancy Pelosi has proved to be, and that Harry Reid is.