Healthcare

Republican Bitching All Around

The Republicans will be attending the big summit:

Republicans, demanding to have a say in the summit’s format and warning for days they have no interest in attending a "public relations" exercise disguised as a substantive negotiation, say that is exactly what the nationally televised event is setting up to be. But Republican leaders will probably attend anyway – perhaps for their own public relations reasons — though they are already labeling the summit a failure.

"So now the president wants to have a little PR event to try to resell a tremendously unpopular plan to Republicans and the American people. The administration still isn't listening," a House Republican leadership aide said Monday....

Yeah, okay. So they're already tipping their hand about how they intend to react afterwards. It goes like this: 1) Bitch about the president not having any televised healthcare negotiations. 2) When the televised negotiation is proposed, they bitch some more. 3) They reluctantly agree to attend but will bitch about it the whole way.

But again, the brilliant politics of this summit will win the day despite the, you know, bitching.