By Richard Cohen
Googling to my hearts content on a recent eve I decided to match health care with ram to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year several votes countless presidential speeches and having to look upon the face of Harry Reid some 10000 times the health care bill is being rammed through Congress -- an absurdity that now has currency through sheer repetition.
It is not exactly the renowned vaunted Big Lie just a miserable little one.
The vaunted reasonable man might protest that an entire lifetime of attempted health care reform does not amount to a ramming but the polls do suggest that President Obamas plan -- and it is now his plan -- is out of favor with the public. This is what now passes for a compelling argument against the bill. It is instead almost entirely beside the point.
In our poll-driven culture it might seem strange for a president to attempt something thats somewhat unpopular but merely right. After all the health care bill has almost no near-term benefit for anyone who votes.
Its immediate beneficiaries are the uninsured consisting of the poor and vulnerable and the young and delusionally invincible. As a voting bloc they largely dont.
The rest of America looks at the bill and shudders. It seems to promise nothing but hardship.

The aged have Medicare and most workers have insurance of some sort or another. Sure many fear losing what they now have and they rightly hate insurance companies but they seem to prefer their existing plans to what they have been told will be a program run by sullen former Soviet bureaucrats.
Opt out and you will be liquidated.
As with almost everything else the Obama administration has attempted the benefits of health insurance reform either are invisible to the monumentally important television camera or are promised for a future time. No one can see savings -- either to the health system or the economy in general -- not because they are fictitious but because they are unfilmable.
It is the same with auto companies that did not disappear a financial system that did not crater and jobs that were retained along with a rate of joblessness that recently has been reduced.
As anyone in TV can tell you it is impossible to film a reduction in the joblessness rate or a bank thats saved -- before and after look identical -- or for that matter teachers who were not laid off because their school system got funds from the stimulus package. These are the visual equivalent of the sound made by the tree that falls in the forest that no one hears. Theres nothing to show.
The Iraq War will not end with Obama on the deck of an aircraft carrier wallowing in patriotic kitsch. The picture will simply go dark. This is a PR dilemma and for Obama a political catastrophe.
Great presidents lead. In a sense Lincoln rammed through the Emancipation Proclamation just as FDR rammed through Lend-Lease Truman rammed through desegregation of the military and Lyndon Johnson rammed the Civil Rights Act down

the throat of a gagging South.
These might be considered more dramatic issues than mundane health care I grant you -- but grant me an exception for someone putting off doctor visits because he or she cant afford to be sick. To that person this bill is as dramatic as the difference between sickness and health -- the great divide of mankind.
The baleful fact is that the country suffers from a surfeit of democracy -- a gazillion interest groups a gazillion blogs a gazillion talk shows and all of them insisting on transparency so a gazillion eyes peer over the shoulders of politicians.
The black but necessary art of politics shies from the sun. Little gets done.
Backrooms have been turned into rec rooms and meetings are seminars. We are doomed.
Worse we are bored.
Google does not tell the whole story. It fails to answer whats wrong with the old belief -- a virtual childhood mantra -- that

majority rules?
It was never supermajority rules and the presidency was never intended as a weather vane turning this way and that on the slight breeze of the latest poll.
Lead and the people will -- or will not -- follow.
Either way ram the damn thing Mr. President. Ram it!