Game On: White House Announces Deficit Summit

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When political debate grinds to a standstill and all hope for compromise seems lost, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as getting everyone together in a room and… restating irreconcilable differences in front of the cameras. President Obama’s deficit reduction proposal and Paul Ryan’s “Path” are miles apart, and there’s limited enthusiasm on both sides about a yet-to-be-detailed plan from the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six. But all those parties will likely be represented at a May 5 Blair House summit just announced by the White House.

The confabulation, says the White House, will invite a “bipartisan, bicameral group to begin work on a legislative framework for comprehensive deficit reduction.” As outlined in Obama’s speech last week, Vice President Biden will play host and mediator.

The last time such a gathering convened was in February of last year, when Obama summoned leaders of both parties to the Blair House to finally complete the sisyphean task of reaching bipartisan consensus on health care reform. You might remember how that went:

Common ground was a scarce commodity at Thursday’s all-day health care summit in Washington. “Let’s talk about some areas where we disagree and see if we can bridge those gaps,” President Obama had implored at the outset. But by the end of the session more than seven hours later, it was clearer than ever that the two parties have fundamentally — and irreconcilably — different views of how to go about fixing the nation’s health care system.

Sure, a few things are different this time around. There’s another Gang of Six, this time from the Senate Budget Committee rather than Finance, but they’ve produced no concrete plan as of yet. Republicans control the House — now they actually have the power to stop a bill they can’t live with and will share responsibility for what, if anything, gets done. The issue is as far-reaching and as complex, but arguably, there’s more urgency this time. Health reform could have died, as it did in the ’90s, and no one would have touched it for another decade or two, at whatever cost. However new it might be, there’s definitely a near-consensus in Washington that medium- and long-term deficits need to be addressed soon. Passing a budget for 2012, any budget, might be impossible without a few steps in that direction.

But as with the 2011 budget deal and the negotiations that finally led to a successful partisan coalition to pass health care, the sausage is made behind closed doors for good reason. Compromise means concession, and concession means exposure to political fallout. The White House will have their deficit summit. Just don’t expect too different a result from last time.