Obama and GOP Senators: Trading Complaints for Debates

On Tuesday, President Obama jaunted up to Capitol Hill to attend the Senate Republicans' weekly private get-together. He had come to discuss legislative priorities for the rest of the year -- which in congressional terms is rather short. You might have heard that there's an election in November, and legislators up for re-election will be spending much of the summer and fall in their home states doing what they can to keep from joining the ranks of the unemployed. Still, there are plenty of items on Washington's to-do list: immigration, energy legislation, a Supreme Court nomination, and more. So it made sense for the president to visit with the opposition to chat about how best to use the coming months. Yet this confab did not appear all that fruitful. It did, however, illustrate two points.

First, social evolution doesn't progress much beyond high school. Second, the nation needs Question Time.

As for Point 1, after Obama's meeting with the Senate GOPers, the president called it "a good, frank discussion." His discussants weren't as diplomatic or polite. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said the meeting was "testy." Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) told reporters that Obama "needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans. He's pretty thin-skinned." Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) complained that Obama is out of touch and "has no information about Senate Republicans." One Republican senator griped to ABC News that he had never heard anyone use the word "I" as much.

That is, the Senate Republicans acted like whiny teenagers as they trashed the president.

With the nation confronted by profound challenges, can't Washington put this adolescent behavior to the side? That's a rhetorical question. But it does bring me to Point 2. This meeting should have been open to the public. If it had been, we could have seen who was really being testy or thin-skinned, and, more important, the public could have witnessed how the highest leaders of this great land handle the important matters of the day.

A few months ago, after Obama held a gripping and edifying public Q&A with House Republicans that was broadcast live on cable TV, a coalition of liberal and conservative bloggers, pundits, and political operatives banded together to demand that the president and the opposition party regularly hold such sessions, noting that this was a long-established practice in England. I was one of the organizers of this effort. We set up a Demand Question Time website and posted an open letter explaining the call. (The country, we said, would benefit from "an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives.") We created an online petition. Our ad hoc endeavor immediately drew media and public attention. (We were big on C-SPAN, CNN, and MSNBC -- not so much on Fox News, for some reason.) But then things fizzled. The White House signaled it was not interested in institutionalizing substantial and candid face-offs between Obama and Republican lawmakers. And the GOP leaders didn't call for more of these sessions. Not surprisingly, the pooh-bahs of the status quo were not interested in changing the status quo. (Meanwhile, the Brits adopted one of our political traditions: televised debates for the elections that would decide who would become that nation's leader.)

Obama's tete-a-tete with Senate GOPers didn't lead to much -- except for Republican grousing. Had there been cameras present, the public (read: voters!) could have judged how each side is dealing with the pressing issues of the moment. And the participants would probably have been less inclined to bitch and moan. True, they could have played to the cameras. But that would carry its own risks. (In an election season, do senators really want to come across as more pompous and self-important?)

I'm not suggesting that there should be no private meetings between the president and opposition lawmakers. There are times when politicians have to cut deals, talk turkey, and make the sausage. But that's not what happens when a president meets with 41 press-hungry senators. If these busy folks -- who work for us taxpayers -- are going to take the time to have a meeting like the one that occurred on Tuesday, the people who pay their salaries ought to get something of value out of it. The best way to ensure such a return is to turn it into Question Time.

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