"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate," the two leaders said in a letter Monday night to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
"Bipartisanship is not writing proposals of your own behind closed doors, then unveiling them and demanding Republican support," they wrote. "Bipartisan ends require bipartisan means."
But the White House's response made it clear that the president, despite all of his talk of coming together in a spirit of bipartisanship, isn't budging an inch from the Democratic healthcare bills he has embraced.
"He's been very clear about his support for the House and Senate bills," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement Monday. "The president looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process," Gibbs said, adding that Obama was "open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny." You can imagine how objective that would be.
Apparently the president learned absolutely nothing from the stunning political message from Massachusetts' voters who sent Republican Scott Brown to Washington to fill the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat on a platform of voting "no" on Obamacare.
Nor has the White House been willing to acknowledge that Democratic support for his legislation has declined as a result of that election and that polls show even stronger public opposition to his healthcare takeover plan. What doesn't he understand about Pelosi's admission that "we don't have the votes"?
The televised summit Obama proposed Sunday is just grandstand play by the White House. The art of legislative deal making is done behind closed doors through tradeoffs and breakthrough compromises, and even a willingness to start over.
In the end, Obama's aloof, hands-off, above-it-all approach to his healthcare agenda was a failed strategy that was doomed from the beginning.
Obamacare is dead. The sooner the White House understands this and accepts it, the sooner Washington can move on to a much more pressing issue: jobs and unleashing the power of American capitalism to build long-term economic growth.
But that's another failure by this presidency that no televised summit is going to fix, especially when you arrogantly leave out the major business groups that create most of the jobs in this country.