"Ain't No Mountain High Enough--"

"To Keep Obama Away From A Summit." Summits actually used to mean something. Since The One assumed office, there has been The Beer Summit (see photo for future beer summits),the Financial Responsibility Summit, The Growing American Jobs Summit, the Olympics Summit, the Health Care Summit, the Summit of the Americas, the NATO Summit, the G-8 Summit, the G-20 Summit, the Jobs Summit (this Thursday), and let's not forget the upcoming Copenhagen Global Warming Summit. I'm sure I've missed a few, but you get the idea.

Summits used to be meetings of great import between heads of major states attempting to work out solutions to problems which had worldwide significance. Some succeeded, some failed. The original summit was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1955, thus the nickname "summit," as in "high in the Alps." President Eisenhower joined Soviet Premier Bulganin, British Prime Minister Eden, and French Premier Faure (Nikita Khruscheve attended, but as an observer). There were many such meetings prior to 1955 (think Yalta, Teheran and Bretton Woods), but the Geneva meeting gave the events a catchy nickname that everyone could remember.

The meaning of "summit meeting" has fallen in significance somewhat over the years, but the master of "change we can believe in" has finally demeaned the word into nothingness. Summits are now Barack Obama photo ops which occasionally put his mug on TV and in the news when he gets tired of making near-daily announcements on socialized medicine or breathless news conferences about race relations. Summits now often include only one important figure, Obama, who is actually the most important figure in the known universe. Instead of meetings between heads of state regarding world affairs, most summits are now comprised of robotic lectures from the sage of Harvard, followed by the raucous cheers of a roomful of carefully-selected Obama supporters.

Summits usually brought results. Camp David brought at least a temporary lull to the Arab-Israeli wars. Another summit produced a nuclear arms limitation agreement between the two superpowers. And then there was the 1960 summit at which Eisenhower and Khruschev hurled insults at each other, but teaching America that overflights of the Soviet Union to gain intelligence would no longer work. Perhaps the most enjoyable (and least productive) was the Hyde Park Summit when Bill Clinton played host to a very tipsy Boris Yeltsin.

But when "summits" are nothing more than balm for the biggest ego in America, they cease to be meaningful, and ordinary people have trouble distinguishing a summit which decides how much over the speed limit the Obama girls will be allowed to drive from a summit averting a worldwide conflagration, it's probably time to drop the word "summit" entirely in the context of important meetings.

Today, "summit" means talk, talk, talk, with no resolution and a pretty confusing agenda. The summits generally involve Obama talking, and talking, and talking, then pretending to care what anybody else had to say, followed by Obama saying how interesting the whole thing was, and that he will be giving it serious thought. Cue cameras. As The New Republic says about Tuesday's jobs summit: "So gabbing about jobs, and projecting the message that you do indeed want to create some--particularly to your harsher critics on the left, like Krugman and Stiglitz--is the best Obama can hope for."

And they go on to say: "The summit has replaced the vaunted bipartisan commission as the ultimate empty gesture. Where a President once kicked a nettlesome political problem down the road by assembling a panel of bipartisan worthies to produce a report on entitlement reform, say, or how we made the mistake of thinking Saddam had WMDs, Obama now holds a confab to jawbone the problem to death. Even better, unlike with a bipartisan commission, with a summit, there's no final report to have to contend with."

Jason Zengerle entitled his article: "So Much Gasbaggery, So Little Time--Why Obama is Obsessed with summits." I think he's on to something.