Unconventional Wisdom

Seattle Times:

PRESIDENT Obama’s return to public meetings on health-care reform elevates a debate that had spiraled dramatically downward. He has been on the defensive. The challenge for Obama is to move from defending reform to selling it.

Vitriolic discourse is as American as apple pie, but the president shouldn’t allow himself to get sidetracked from the promise of extending health-care coverage to more than 45 million Americans without it and streamlining this country’s unwieldy and unaffordable medical-care system.
…
To the New Hampshire protesters, Obama said: “Where we do disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that has actually been proposed.”

That was the president at his best, using calm, nondefensive language to pull citizens back from the brink and to the reality of health-care legislation on the table.