So Many Summits, So Little Time
Jason Zengerle, The New Republic
Barack Obama convened his first official summit before he was even elected president. In October 2008, then-candidate Obama gathered a gaggle of business and political heavyweights--Paul Volcker, Eric Schmidt, Jennifer Granholm, Bill Richardson, etc.--in a Florida community college gymnasium for what his campaign billed as the "Growing American Jobs Summit."
"No cheerleading," Obama admonished the 1,700 people who packed into the sweltering gym expecting a campaign rally. "We've got serious work to be done." And then, for the next 90 minutes, Obama and the assembled worthies engaged in a wonky discussion that ranged from ideas for fixing the country's electrical grid to calls for reforming its banking system.
It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that Obama would go a bit summit-crazy once he was actually in the White House.
Little more than a month after taking office, he held a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" where he solicited ideas for battling the deficit; a few weeks after that he hosted a "Health Care Summit" to kick off his drive for health care reform; and later still came the "H1N1 Preparedness Summit" and the "Distracted Driving Summit."
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