Backfire: What was Obama thinking in holding that summit?

The Democrats, by contrast, suffered from an acute case of “anecdotitis” (is it a preexisting condition?): Almost all of them delivered speeches that boasted a story or two meant to tug at the heart. Obama set the tone with his account of Sasha’s asthma, Malia’s meningitis, and his mom’s ovarian cancer. Nancy and Harry—as Obama called them—told us, respectively, of having “seen grown men cry,” and of a “young man called Jesus” who was stiffed by his insurers. Steny Hoyer gave us a sob story, Louise Slaughter told us about a woman who had to wear her dead sister’s teeth, Tom Harkin told us of a letter he got “yesterday, from a farmer in Iowa…” This constant argument-by-anecdote was relentlessly populist; but it was also fatally weak, as it was the infantilizing of a national audience, an invitation to Americans to wince and say, “Gee, things are bad out there. We need this bill!”

What became clear in the long hours through which the summit meandered was that Obama was the best Democrat on display, a president surrounded by pygmies and paint-by-number partisans. Without his presence, the summit would have been a fiasco for the Democrats. And yet, in wading through the weeds on TV with legislators, in engaging in tetchy exchanges with John McCain, in sitting through such silliness as Tom Harkin’s suggestion that those who oppose the bill favor some kind of “segregation,” in playing—in effect—the bruising role of a prime minister in the push for legislation, he got closer to the coal-face of American politics than is dignified for a president.