Healthcare summit: drawing a comparison

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We’re in the home stretch now, not far from the scheduled end of the summit, which, incidentally, keeps getting pushed back because — in classic Washington fashion — not everyone has had a chance to speak.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has a fairly simple message for the group: The summit was a train to nowhere and the Democrats’ bill is a dog. Wait. Those are our metaphors. Roskam had plenty of his own. He compared the bill to something thrown in “the microwave.”

Later he compared it to something drawn on an “Etch A Sketch.” He said the problem with the bill was “the message” not the “messenger.”

Roskam, who worked with President Obama in the Illinois Senate, suggested that the president had not come to Blair House to work out a compromise with the GOP. Instead, Roskam said, the president wanted to know, “What is it going to take for you Republicans to vote for my bill?”

The bill, he said, was like a microwaved dish with “a little salt, a little pepper, with some Republican bread crumbs on top.” But, he said, the bill’s unpopularity with the GOP and the public wasn’t Obama’s fault, that Obama had sold the bill the best he could.

“This is a problem with the message,” he said, “not a problem with the messenger.” His constituents, he said, had turned against the bill the more they heard about it. “They listened and they listened and they listened,” Roskam said. “In my district, they’ve become increasingly disappointed with what they’ve seen come out of this process.”

And in a final piece of performance art, he compared the bill to that childhood staple, the Etch A Sketch, pantomiming twisting the dials as he did so, saying the bill grew worse the more it was drawn. Finally, a little less conversation, a little more action.

-- James Oliphant