Over the weekend while a blizzard rolled into Washington DC, ignoring all signs of the administration’s projections of climate warming, President Obama called a meeting in the oval office of his key advisers Rham Emanuel and David Axelrod to discuss the next steps in health care reform, which he openly refuses to accept is dead in the water.  The meeting took place before the president held an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric prior to the Super Bowl.  It was a classic Saul Alinsky community organizing strategy meeting.  And, Emanuel and Axelrod, both Alinsky believers, called it for what it was before the meeting.

Obama: “Rahm, David you know I’m not going to give up on health care reform and as you know I have an interview prior to the Super Bowl with Couric and we know the subject of health care will come up, among many others.  Your thoughts?”

Emanuel: “Mr. President, I think we have a chance to turn this around even if we don’t get a bill for now.  I think we should invite both Democratic and Republican leaders to an open televised meeting to clear the air and to solicit ideas on health care from both parties.”

Obama: “Yes, but I don’t want to give up any ground on either the house or senate bills.”

Emanuel: “With all due respect Mr. President, you excel in your performance and this is an opportunity to perform.  Perhaps not to the point you are going to convince those up for election this year, but perhaps you can, during the public meeting, show that the Republicans are obstructionists – that will be a political gain for any Democrat running in 2010.  We know they will come up with the usual, crossing state lines for insurance, tort reform and proposing that we start over with bipartisan discussions.”

Obama: “I’m not starting over.”

Axelrod: “Mr. President, I think Rahm has an idea, although it may be a strategy that keeps us in a holding pattern for now.  Allow me to remind you of a chapter in Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules For Radicals”, I think it was the chapter on communication. I looked it up; allow me to quote an excerpt:

“Much of the time . . . the organizer will have a pretty good idea of what the community should be doing, and he will want to suggest, maneuver, and persuade the community toward that action.  He will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead, he will use loaded questions.

“And so the guided questioning goes on without anyone losing face or being left out of the decision-making.  Every weakness of every proposed tactic is probed by questions.

“Eventually someone suggests a tactic and again through questions, its positive features emerge and it is decide on.”

Alinski goes on, Axlerod notes: “Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less even a Socrates.  As time goes on and education proceeds, the leadership becomes increasingly sophisticated.  The organizer recedes from the local circle of decision makers . . .  his job becomes one of weaning the group away from any dependency upon him.  Then his job is done.”

“Mr. President, this is the way we should go.  It shows transparency and through a subliminal approach we cast the blame on the other party.”

Obama: “I think this is good, I will tell Couric that we will call a Summit later this month and go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.  I will tell her that I want to look at the Republican ideas that are out there.  And I want to be very specific.  For example, how do you guys want to lower costs?  How do you guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care?  I’ll tell her that if we can go step by step through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, than procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster than the process took last year.”

Emanuel: “That’s it Mr. President, you lead by asking questions and raising issues about cost.  This will begin to shift the attention to the GOP and portray them as obstructionists.  My other suggestion is to not hold this at the White House.  Let’s pick a neutral ground, like the Blair House.  It doesn’t cast the imprimatur of the heavy handiness of the White House.  Mr. President, you are a performer – you can pull this off.”

Obama: “It’s like Kabuki theatre.”

Emanuel: “You got it, Mr President.”