Chill: Health-care reform isn’t in trouble yet

By GottaLaff

Take two paragraphs every 4 hours and call me in the morning:

Only after something passes the House and the Senate will the real work begin. The conference committee to hammer out a final, identical bill will be the mother of all summits. That’s where President Obama must weigh in heavily to shape and then sell the outcome. Contrary to all the carping, what he and the White House do before then on the specifics of the legislation doesn’t much matter. The White House’s only job until we get to conference is to shape the climate of opinion with one simple end in mind. Legislators need to get the message that their constituents want “change” on health care, and will punish them for supporting the status quo. The White House’s mission is to be sure that enough legislators feel they cannot safely oppose Obama’s definition of “change.” That’s it. (It’s also a tall enough order, what with organized conservative protesters having the early edge in disrupting town hall meetings as lawmakers head home for recess).

You can’t channel surf on cable these days without seeing pundits who insist that: 1) Obama has over-learned the lessons of Clintoncare; 2) ceded too much power to Congress; and 3) blown it by not detailing what he wants in a final bill at this point. These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. [...] [A] president’s job is to preserve enough flexibility to get the results he seeks while carrying most of the people along with him. A studied ambiguity as events unfold is indispensable to this task, and Obama intuits this just right.

Once we get to conference, however, Obama’s role must change. That will be the moment. That’s when he and his team have to knock heads, crafting a deal that covers everyone, funds this in economically rational ways, and slows system-wide cost growth. As importantly, that’s when Obama must move from Rose Garden jawboning and press conference talking points to a riveting series of speeches on health care that will rival his race speech during the campaign. [...]

Between now and then, everyone should take a deep breath. The talking heads have to fill up air time, but the rest of us should remember: until we get to conference, it’s all prelude.