After watching parts of Thursday’s joint health care summit, I can assure you that I found nothing sickening about this genuine attempt to make headway on the issue.

It’s been a hotbed topic for a while now, and while I am a fan of President Barack Obama, I thought this would all be merely a show. I didn’t know how long the summit would be, but I was pleasantly surprised when it lasted six hours. I thought those six hours would be filled with the typical partisan bickering that ultimately led to the summit, but it wasn’t. If there’s one major thing I came away with, it was that both sides are very passionate about what’s best for their constituencies, rather than merely following their party line to make a point.

President Obama came across as a big winner here. He could have proven vulnerable to all the criticisms and attacks placed on him, but his rhetoric and eloquence emerged as the victor. He proved that he doesn’t need the teleprompter to make good points. He proved that he doesn’t need spin doctors by his side at all times to help him. He proved that he is smart enough to know almost every nook and cranny of the 2,400-page bill.

And speaking of 2,400-page bills, I thought one of the most tactless moves of the day was by my fellow Virginian Republican Eric Cantor. Cantor and a few other Republicans had the whole health care bill on paper in front of them as a poor attempt to show how nobody can possibly understand or give all the answers to all the questions and problems that the health care dilemma raises. Obama quickly retorted to the stunt, ‘These are the kinds of political things we do that prevent us from having a conversation.’ And he was absolutely right.

The fact that the most qualified Republican to speak at the summit, Sen. Tom Coburn, a licensed physician, said that a new bill requires more fiscal responsibility than anything is important. He emphasized the need to make this bill as cheap and productive as possible. This hit the nail on the head, not only in terms of logistics, but in terms of what we already knew – that there are so many compromises already entrenched in this bill. The things separating Democrats and Republicans are universal concerns; it’s just how they are going about solving them that’s causing the most controversy. And I think this came to light in a big way, not only in the summit itself, but in the coverage after.

In a way, they’re so close but so far. While I would agree with most that this summit had disaster written all over it, I think it was productive as being a marketplace for ideas and a place for growth of understanding through conversation. Even if a health care bill doesn’t get passed this year, there’s something to be said about Obama’s ‘culture of Washington’ being changed a little bit for the better as a result of this.

David Kaplan is a sophomore broadcast journalism and political science major. His column appears weekly, and he can be reached at dhkaplan@syr.edu.

Published on March 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm