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It was "a short summit," shrugged NBC's Savannah Guthrie by way of explanation for why she hardly paid any attention to its agenda "from the economy to energy to the swine 'flu." She decided to focus on Barack Obama's domestic preoccupations instead as he urged a calm tone in the debate over healthcare reform. ABC's Jake Tapper, too, picked up on a healthcare angle from the summit, asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada whether a single payer system results in treatment delays. "If you are prepared to spend an unlimited amount of money you can do an almost unlimited number of things in people's healthcare," was Harper's reply, implicitly conceding that delays occur.
Chip Reid on CBS was the White House correspondent who took the summit's agenda seriously, noting "little progress on a series of long-running contentious issues" such as stalled cooperation against narcotraffickers, Mexico's flawed record on human rights and the NAFTA-busting ban on Mexican truck traffic north of the border. Reid did see cooperation concerning the swine 'flu, which is more serious in this hemisphere than in the rest of the world. Of the globe's 1,154 H1N1 deaths, fully 1,008 have occurred in the Americas, north and south.
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