So much for Friday night’s boycott theory. The Gingrich plan is, it seems, in effect:

Republicans have accused the president of using Thursday’s summit as political theater, and had raised the prospect of not attending. McConnell dismissed the idea of a GOP boycott, saying that “we’re discussing the — sort of the makeup of the room and that sort of thing, but yeah, I intend to be there and my members will be there and ready to participate.”…

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said in response that “the upcoming meeting is an opportunity to get beyond oft repeated and completely false talking points like these. . . . The President is coming to the meeting with an open mind and he hopes the Republicans do as well.”

Right. Via the LA Times, take a nice deep whiff of the White House’s new “bipartisanship”:

As voters lose patience with political gridlock, the Obama administration is embarking on a strategy aimed at putting Republicans on the spot: Either participate in bipartisan exchanges initiated by the president, or be portrayed as the party of obstruction…

“When you’re the president, you have the loudest microphone and clearest TV camera,” said Mark Corallo, a Republican strategist. “You get to stand up and look reasonable, bipartisan and leader-like. And anyone else ends up . . . looking like a petty partisan who is just interested in saying no. There’s no upside for the Republicans in even attending the healthcare summit.”…

An administration official said that in coming months, the White House would be quicker to point out instances of what he described as Republican intransigence. Though the White House has long believed that Republicans were committed to derailing Obama’s agenda, officials will be more aggressive in making the case.

In other words, a day after we watched that communique from Mount Olympus urging both sides not to turn the summit into political theater, here’s the White House all but admitting that the summit’s a key scene in the elaborate political theater they’ll be staging until November. Wonderful.

I was going to give you a clip of McConnell dumping on reconciliation, but this snippet of George Will celebrating the joys of gridlock and slamming the media for whining about “broken government” only when that government is controlled by the left is a better use of your time. He’s having a big weekend, huh?