Obama reaches out to moderate Republicans

A smart story in Politico shows that Obama has been quitely working on a small scale to try and woo moderate GOP house members to his side on health care reform. His efforts to reach out to Republicans in the past have largely failed on almost every major initiative where it was tried, so instead of large public displays of interest in bipartisanship with the President visiting the capitol, that are then seen as wholesale failures when Republican votes are scarce. Obama has tacked a new course: find a few moderate voices within the Republican party that may be open to your point of view and invite them over to the White House to try and frame a debate they can contribute too.
Although the administration admits getting any Republican support for his health care reform plan is going to be a stretch, especially when the GOP rank and file face daunting political pressures as further conservative factions within the party threaten to make looming primary fights inevitable. Contributing even slightly to the grand health care debate could serve to simply pad the resume for any house member, Republican or Democrat, that wants to give it's respective district some substance.
The Administration also made news this weekend when it brought another moderate Republican into it's tent and made Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Ambassador to China, a clever and calculated move that left tongues wagging in the Washington punditocracy and created endless speculation about Huntsman's own possible presidential ambitions in '12 or '16.
Although I am of the opinion that no candidate who accepted such a generous political appointment in the opposition parties administration, would be able to survive a crowded primary of his own party. Especially as he tried to denounce the policies of the administration he served in to please "the base" voters that generally turn up in primary elections. (It would be like John Kerry or Hillary Clinton accepting the same position in the Bush administration and then running a campaign based solely on opposition to that same administration's policies)
Whether it is intentional or not, Obama continues to create the illusion of a "collapse" at the Republican center, overseeing what appears to be the growing of his own party at the sake of absorbing the moderate wing of his opposition, a win-win scenario that burnishes his own bipartisan credentials, while at the same time sending the GOP more into "the wilderness," causing them to rely on more and more conservative voices that are out of step with the American mainstream.