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Ezra Klein in the Wash Post:

The big story out of the summit is not that Republicans and Democrats extended their hands in friendship, but that the White House has dug its heels into the dirt. The Democrats are not taking reconciliation off the table, they are not paring back the bill, and they are not extricating themselves from the issue. They think they’re right on this one, and they’re going to try and pass this legislation.

Today was a boost for that effort. The Democrats got hours to make their case, at an event they planned, with one of their own controlling the discussion. For that reason, I imagine that this will be the last bipartisan summit we see for awhile. The format is simply too kind to the president, and he takes advantage of it ruthlessly. When the camera panned, you could almost see Republicans wondering why they’d accepted the invitation.

The people who came off best were those who knew the most about the issue. Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn on the Republican side. Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd for the Democrats. But above all of them, the president, who got to enter, adjudicate and conclude discussions at will — not to mention say when others didn’t know that much about the issue, or weren’t offering comments in good faith. That willingness to put himself above Congress, combined with the structure of the event, allowed Obama to fully dominate the proceedings, and he used the opportunity to firmly assert ownership over the health-care bill. This is now his legislation.

But for all that he’s made the bill his own, it still has to make a final pass through Congress. Importantly, Harry Reid and other Democrats were not only using the word reconciliation, but defending it from attack. Obama joined them in this effort. But the question is what the handful of ambivalent Democrats in the House and Senate thought. Obama spent the day trying to convince them that passing this bill was right: Not just politically, but intellectually and morally. That was his argument for why he’s still here, lashing himself tighter to this legislation, and why they should stick by him.

Ron Pearlstein in the Wash Post:

I’m not sure what else was accomplished at Thursday’s Blair House summit, but surely one result is that we learned what Republican “leaders” really think about health care and health insurance.

The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can’t afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that’s their problem — there’s nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it.
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What we didn’t hear from Kyl, or Camp, or Coburn or McCain, however, was an offer to vote for a health reform plan if these problems were fixed and their ideas were incorporated. Without even the hint of such offers, there was little reason for a willing president and his unwilling allies to even consider serious compromise. Now the losers will be the American people, who could have surely benefited from such productive dealmaking.

Paul Krugman in the NYTimes:

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking.
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So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic:

The Republicans have their justifications–and, to be fair, if they are convinced government spending and regulation will do more harm than good, then they are right to hold these many views. But it is not as if their alternatives even come close to solving the problems Democrats would. Instead, Republicans seem to believe these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, at least in any manner they would find acceptable.

And this explains the message Republicans delivered over and over again on Thursday: Rip up the bill and start over. That’s not a plea for compromise. That’s a demand for capituation. And it frames the choice for Democrats pretty clearly. Either they will act alone, or they will not act at all.

Eddie Reeves on Huffington Post:

Most of the early press reports called the summit a draw, with some, like Politico’s indefatigable Glen Thrush, going so far as to give the edge to the GOP:

“But in this case, the tie goes to Republicans, according to operatives on both sides of the aisle — because the stakes were so much higher for Democrats trying to build their case for ramming reform through using a 51-vote reconciliation tactic.”

Nonsense.

This wasn’t a draw, and anyone who thinks so missed the brilliant strategy.

It’s been a fait accompli for months now that if health care is to pass, it will do so solely with Democratic support. So the whole game for the administration is to shore up those nervous swing Midwestern and Southern Democrats whose votes are crucial but in jeopardy. Solidifying the support of these two dozen or so Members was the true aim of the summit.

In one fell swoop, the President altered the trajectory of the health care debate. First, merely by announcing this summit, he calmed the tsunami of negative press coverage that deluged him and his party after the GOP Senate victory in Massachusetts.

Next, the announcement took the spotlight off Democratic congressional leaders and put it on the President himself. That was smart, since, despite his travails of the last several months, the President’s personal popularity still rates highly among the American people, while that of Reid, Pelosi et al. comes in just north of dirty gym socks.

The gambles that Barack Obama took with this summit were three-fold:

Gamble #1 – Could he strike the right rhetorical balance between big-picture statesman and deal-seeking negotiator?

Gamble #2 – Could he use the summit in effect to replace Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the health reform legislative push?

Gamble #3 – Could he count on the Republicans to continue to be the party of obstinacy and obstruction?

There is no question that the President won all three rolls of the dice.