Obama, facilitator-in-chief

There was a time in American politics when the word “summit” called to mind Roosevelt at Yalta, Kennedy in Vienna, Reagan at Reykjavik. The fate of empires rose and fell on such summits. The legacies of statesmen were made and broken.

These days, the presidential summit is more like an extended photo op with some speeches and a dinner thrown in. This week’s “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” (a response to the run of terrorist attacks from Paris to Copenhagen) closely follows similar White House summits on community colleges, early education, cybersecurity, football head injuries, “working families,” college opportunity, national service, youth (as in young people, not the fountain) and so on.

All of which is harmless enough, except that it tells you something about where the Obama presidency has ended up, and about the nature of governing in a city where governing seems to be the last thing on anybody’s mind.

There’s nothing new or unusual about the idea of using the power of the White House to convene a conversation on some contentious or overlooked issue; it’s been going on for at least a century. Bill Clinton held summits to curb gun violence and to coax broadcast executives into establishing decency standards. (You can see how well those worked out.) George W. Bush’s White House hosted discussions on malaria and global literacy, among others.

But in the last year or so, Barack Obama’s team has deployed the presidential summit as a central response to just about every topic of national significance that doesn’t involve Bruce Jenner’s gender switch. (Though no one’s ruling that out.) At this late stage of Obama’s presidency, the idea seems to be that talking about a policy — or at least being seen talking about it — is a kind of policy in itself.

When Obama held his “Healthy Kids and Safe Sports Concussion Summit” last May, White House aides compared him to Theodore Roosevelt, who had summoned football coaches to the White House 100 years earlier to discuss the game’s safety. Well, OK, except that TR spent most of his time, you know, smashing corporate monopolies and redefining American power for a century to come. For him, the summit business was really more of a distraction, like hunting hippos.

It’s not hard to see why summits would appeal to any modern, besieged White House. The media is splintered into a thousand niche audiences now, so no president can easily command the kind of attention for his issues that most of his predecessors could. The so-called bully pulpit is more like a subway singer’s microphone these days, competing for attention amid the noise and bustle.

At the same time, in the era of celebrity politics, when we put our faith in people over parties or ideas, Americans expect their president to have an answer for every intractable problem, no matter how complex or long-term. We expect him to grapple personally with every new challenge that arises in our communities, whether it’s police brutality or helmet design.

So you can imagine the meeting where communications aides are banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out some strategy to get the entire White House press corps reporting on college tuition, or how to persuade the public that they really are doing something about videotaped beheadings or global hackers, until somebody blurts out: “Let’s just do a summit!” It’s like naming a White House “czar” for economic growth or bird flu — a reflex meant to convey the appearance of action where action itself is muddled and elusive.

In a more specific way, however, summit mania reflects the choices Obama has been forced to make in this last, frustrating term in office.

It was a little over a year ago, in his 2014 State of the Union address, that Obama effectively declared the legislating phase of his presidency over. Aides insisted he still had a “phone and a pen” and would thereafter rely on them, meaning that he would call lots of people and sign executive actions, instead. They didn’t say anything about a stapler, although you’d have to think that remains in the president’s formidable arsenal, too.

Obama has made good on his vow to use executive action wherever possible (most notably on immigration, where a federal judge ruled against him this week), but now that avenue is more or less exhausted, too. So these empty summits are, in a sense, all that’s left. The fewer ways Obama can find to actually enact policy, the more he finds himself relegated to the role of intellectual facilitator, a Phil Donahue for the listicle age.

This isn’t all his doing, of course, or even mostly so; it’s what Republicans expressly set out to do. Going back at least to the failed budget negotiations of 2011, they wanted him to give up on the legislative process entirely. They wanted to delegitimize him, to force him into behaving like the tyrant their fundraising appeals needed him to be.

But if Obama’s adversaries are tempted to rejoice at his diminished role, they shouldn’t. Because the summit presidency really isn’t good for anyone. What both parties have done is to create a new standard for dysfunction, in which it’s now perfectly acceptable for a Congress to refuse to negotiate with a president, while a president disengages entirely from the ugliness of lawmaking and assumes the role of public advocate instead.

And once established, such standards have a way of becoming embedded. Do we really think, should roles be reversed in 2016 or 2018, that a Democratic Congress won’t try to sideline a Republican president the same way? Or that the next president, no matter which party he or she comes from, won’t be more inclined to give up on Congress and pursue a presidency based on divisive fiats and pointless summits?

The community groups and foreign ministers who came to Washington this week may well be grateful for the chance to discuss “violent extremism.” But you can bet it’s not lost on them that the spectacle in which they’re participating is a sorry substitute for a functioning government in the world’s most important capital.

Washington badly needs an old-style summit — that’s for sure. But the extremists who really ought to attend aren’t even speaking.