When he jousts with Congressional Republicans over health care policy during a televised meeting on Thursday, President Obama will seek to portray his adversaries as sharing many of the broad goals of his legislation and also strive to unify Congressional Democrats to press ahead and adopt a bill, senior White House officials and leading Democrats say.
But Mr. Obama, top White House advisers and Congressional leaders of both parties are under no illusion that the meeting will resolve more than a half-century of disagreements over health care policy. Instead, Democrats say, they hope the event will create a climate that helps revive their legislation in Congress and prove to the American public that they are willing to hear out Republicans and even adopt their ideas.
“We may not be able to resolve all the disagreements, but we ought to be able to thrash out areas of broad agreement,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “The fact is, there are broad areas of agreement on elements of this, and hopefully that will become apparent here.”
Mr. Axelrod added, “Sitting side by side working through these issues is better than not sitting side by side and dealing with distortions.”
Republican leaders have not yet committed to attending the session and have said they doubt the sincerity of Mr. Obama’s bipartisan overtures, given his refusal to discard the Democrats’ legislation and start over. But senior Republican aides said that party leaders planned to participate and that a chief goal would be to portray the president as defying the will of the American people if he continues pushing for an expansive and expensive bill.
SOURCE: New York Times
