Grade for the great test of leadership: Incomplete

In a 7,000-word speech, Obama devoted 500 words to health care, beginning at almost the exact mid-point. So it may seem perverse to assess the whole speech on the basis of the health care portion.  But it's not. Health care remains the fulcrum, the keystone, the hinge, the pivot point, the centerpiece of Obama's domestic agenda, for these reasons:

• He says the deficit keeps him up at night. Well, as he used to remind us frequently, say nine months ago, health care reform is entitlement reform. Bend the health care cost curve, and the Federal government's core commitments are affordable; fail to, and they're not. But those magic seeds of cost control packed into the Senate bill that Atul Gawande catalogued so lovingly will not become law unless the House passes that bill.
  
  
• Obama's core campaign promise, reiterated in an email to supporters following the speech, was "restoring economic security for struggling middle class families."   That cannot be done as long as losing a job means exposure to catastrophic medical cost, or as long as having the wrong job can make insurance an impossible dream, or as long as millions of "insurance" policies leave holders exposed to catastrophic costs. 
  
  
• He said that change is not easy, that he wanted to tackle the hard stuff, . In the health care reform process, Americans got full frontal exposure -- overexposure, according to conventional wisdom -- to the mammoth difficulties and not-always-destructive competitive tradeoffs of moving major legislation through the United States Congress. That leaves Obama with a double message: let's fix the process/let's make the process work. Both messages will spiral to massive fail if a comprehnsive bill does not pass.