Speaking to the "Costco constituency"

Charles M. Blow (Op-ed, NY Times):

The president is huddled with his harried team, prepping for his big health care speech on Wednesday.

Let’s hope someone among these Ivy League oracles will convince the president to come down from his cloud and speak to the Costco constituency. As we witnessed during his presidential campaign, he can have a hard time speaking to everyday people in everyday language.

His opponents don’t have that problem. Death panels. Death books. Taxpayer dollars for abortion. Kill Grandma. Take away choice. Is some of this rhetoric blatantly silly? Yes. But, also brilliantly simple.

Conservatives speak in bumper stickers. Obama speaks in thesis statements. In fact, he sometimes seems constitutionally incapable of concision.

He also seems to display a disdain for irrational excitability and confronts it with either princely dispassion, mocking disbelief or stirring oratory that speaks more to posterity than to the people in front of him.

So, with little coherent opposition, conservatives have feted the public with a campaign of confusion and fear composed of simple sound bites. And, it has worked.

According to a CBS News poll released on Tuesday, 67 percent of respondents said that they didn’t have an understanding of health care reform ideas because they found them too confusing.

Furthermore, the president’s lack of leadership and passion for his plan has translated into a lack of passion among his base.

Epic fail, Team Obama.

In American debates, and particularly in this debate, facts are not sufficient, no matter how eloquently spoken. We want to be moved by passion and conviction and determination and faith. We coalesce around simple ideas like right and wrong, and for many, yes, good and evil.

Some may dislike this simplicity and wish it were different (I am among them), but in politics you have to play on the field where the game is.

Now the president is rolling up his sleeves in a last-ditch effort to fight for the plan instead of leaving it up to a Congress that no one likes. As the Pew Center reported on Wednesday, Congressional favorability has hit a 24-year low.

But, it may be too late. According to a CNN poll released on Wednesday, nearly 3 in 4 Americans want to make major changes to current health care bills, to abandon those bills and start over or to scrap all attempts at reform.

Let’s hope the president doesn’t deliver yet another speech for the history books — soaring, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Then again, it may not really matter what he says since he appears to be taking a tattered page from an old political playbook: when you’re losing, simply change the definition of winning. The public option has gone from imperative to, well, optional.

Howie P.S.: In other words, "keep it real, Barack."