The Disastrous Health-Care Debate

If the health-care debate has achieved one thing, it’s been to unite the Republican Party. So says Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal column this week on the “disaster” of a health-care debate, which could turn into a bill that’s somewhere between a “pig in a poke and three-card Monte.” She says Obama has proven that, like Jimmy Carter, he’s “brilliant at becoming president but not being president.” Obama’s town-hall meetings, Noonan says, have become a giant game of softball. One memorable question came from a grade-school girl in Portsmouth, N.H., about the signs she’s seen that say “mean things” about health care. “I’ve seen some of those signs,” the president responded, continuing that there had been a “rumor” that the House voted for “death panels” that will “pull the plug on grandma,” but that none of that is true. Writes Noonan: “I’m glad he’d like psychiatric care included in future coverage, because after that answer, that child may need therapy.”