Once More, With Feeling: Will Obama (Finally) Make the Moral Case for Reform?

"Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father."
-- "King Lear's" Earl of Gloucester

OK, it's not that bad. But as is so often the case when attraction fades, the same quality that drew me to President Obama is also what's been driving me crazy about him lately: namely, that whole "no drama'' thing. When he was running against Hillary, you could not shut me up about what a blessed relief the absence of agita would be: No more Bill and Hill sideshows, or aggrievement as an art form, or tall tales that might turn out to have been improved upon ever so slightly.

At this point, however, after a solid month of pretend death panels and real armed protesters, extreme comparisons and weak-kneed trial balloons, I am ready for: a bucket of espresso, some righteous anger, a president who is feeling this health care issue in his kishkes and showing it with clarity and passion in his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

In a Sunday Washington Post piece about the challenges that await him with Congress back in session this week, an Obama confidant accurately described the president's political style as "unsentimental.'' Indeed, for all the nonsense about the cult of personality around this master (bwahaha) manipulator, he is on the contrary quite stingy on the emotional playing field on which elections are won and issues decided; even at the funeral of the man who did as much as anyone to get him elected, he was his usual low-affect self, keepin' it cool.

And if he is such a genius emoter, then I wish he'd whip us up already, because this one is too important to argue with perfect calm, or with a plan so malleable and a presentation so diffuse it gives the impression of weakness, or maybe even ambivalence. In his determination to repeat none of Clinton's mistakes, he is also over-correcting Bill and Hillary's 1993 approach to health care reform (no consultation, and little openness to compromise) by consulting everybody and appearing willing to compromise on everything – perhaps at the risk of winding up just as empty-handed.

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in defense of the administration's stimulus package – though it was really more about health care, too – and something he said caught my attention, and spoke to this same wrong-headed fear of feeling: "Roughly another third of the money in the Recovery Act went to relief . . . for working Americans who were most badly hit by the recession,'' he said. "Whether it was through the state governments to keep cops, firefighters and teachers on the job, or allowing states to continue to provide food assistance to people who were in danger of going hungry, or Medicaid for the swelling rolls of people desperately in need of health care. . . . Not only does this give relief to the vulnerable Americans who are in danger of falling into the abyss, it also -- it also has had the economic effect of injecting nearly $90 billion in the first 200 days into the bloodstream of the American economy, stimulating growth. I believe this was the right thing to do morally. But that's not what we're about today. [Emphasis mine.] It was also the smart thing to do economically.''

That's not what we're about today? Biden might have intended that any one of several ways, and I do not think he meant it literally, but "that's not what we're about" as in: people don't want to hear that? Or as in: if that's what we were about, then that would bust the Democrats as soft and sentimental after all?

In any case, the "right thing to do morally" is what the president is going to have to be about today – and tomorrow when he talks to Congress, and again the day after that – if he's going to sell this thing. He is going to have to make the all-out moral case for reform, and explain not just why cutting health care costs is vital to the economy but why denying coverage or limiting access or cutting off insurance benefits mid-chemo is an assault on the whole life's work of that guy Jesus, and thus ought to be an outrage to every Christian.

He is going to have to preach it – which, ironically enough, I've heard him do most effectively in the past on the same super-subversive topic he's talking to school kids about today – personal responsibility. Why must he take to the pulpit? We are a nation of believers, and beyond that like to think of ourselves as voting our morality as much as our pocketbook. God-talk happens to be a language he speaks fluently. And if this isn't a moral issue, I don't know what is.

Yes, he's done this at least once already on the topic of health care, on a recent conference call with left-leaning religious groups -- only that really was preaching to the choir. And yes, he's whispered that we are all our brother's keepers and our sister's keepers, but he needs to make it rain, for heaven's sake; I wanna hear some thunder.

For the first time in a long time, I did hear some promising rumblings in his Labor Day speech in Cincinnati, where he spoke at an AFL-CIO picnic: "I'll have a lot more to say about this on Wednesday night'' he said of health care. "I might have to save my voice a little bit, not get too excited,'' heaven forfend.

The nearly 10-minute story he closed with on Monday – about where that "Fired up and ready to go!'' chant from his campaign came from – was, as he noted, a story "some [read: all] of you have heard . . . before. But I'm going to tell it again,'' he said, and did, hopefully for his very own benefit. Though this was definitely the extended-play version, the basics are that one morning early in his presidential run, when he felt extra tired and crappy and it was raining and he'd trekked his pre-presidential derriere out to the middle of nowhere to shake only 20 hands, he met a little lady in a church hat whose thing in life is going around saying, "Fired up and ready to go!'' – and she got him all charged up in spite of himself.

It's not even so much that the story has such a great point (which is that one voice can change a whole room and one room can change a whole town and so on) as that he really likes telling it, and seems to have needed to hear it, so I'm glad he got to. "There are things worth fighting for,'' he told the union crowd. And maybe even worth raising your voice over, and calling out to God.