I'd agree with your argument in the event that a) President Obama has a single priority and is willing to spend all of his political capital ramming that priority down the Congress's collective throat and b) President Obama has the votes to get his version of a bill through the Congress, and these votes will be loyal and stick with him throughout a long debate. Since both of these would need to be true and neither of them are, he has to compromise, so the question becomes how and when.

Since the end product of the legislative process is always a compromise, the President could operate on the theory that if he articulates the core principles of what he's looking for at the start, he can share authorship and ownership of the resulting product and take a role in shaping it while it's still being baked, and can sign it so long as his core principles (the non-negotiable elements) are maintained. If he can't shepherd a bill through in this way, he's not a good enough politician, which modern Presidents must be if they want to be successful.

The more important of my conditions is actually the first. Improving access to quality medical care in this country is a huge priority, perhaps even the most important priority, for Mr. Obama, but it is not the only one. If his team burns bridges to the other party and spurns members of his own to get his healthcare bill passed, it's going to be much harder for him to tackle some of the other big issues he'd like to take up-- education, entitlement reform, environmental policy, and the like.

Will the outcome be what President Obama envisioned? No. Will it be what you or I would put together if we were tasked with building a reform package? No. But if the compromise gets passed--ugly as it may be-- as long as it's a step in the right direction, it's a step farther than Obama's Democratic predecessor managed to travel.

One last thought--The approval of the best and the brightest stopped mattering in the governing process before the two of us were born, and I don't see it coming back into fashion for a long, long time, if ever.

Just hang in there. In a few years, you'll get your wish. These days I'm free to choose whatever citation format I want to fit the subject of the paper I'm writing, so long as I stay consistent throughout the paper. In four years of college and almost a full year of grad school, the only comment I ever got about my citations was from one professor who took the time to find an inconsistency in my formatting, and it was for a course on historical research practices, so it wasn't entirely out of left field. For my MA thesis, I have a choice of three formats, but I have a feeling I can get away with doing whatever I want so long as I'm not reinventing the wheel.

I agree with you to the extent that I'd rather see an invitation to join a plan of action than another stream of complaints. However, I think it's important to note that AARP's role in the public debate (as reflected in the ad) isn't to solve America's healthcare crisis. AARP, and the powerful voting bloc it represents, is sending a message to politicians that it's the job of Congress and the White House to develop a solution, and a lot of Americans are paying attention. Morgan Freeman was the only person in that ad old enough to be an AARP member, and the general message was one of consensus building. I've seen advocacy ads that are bitter and divisive. Given all that, I find it a bit harder to fault the AARP for promoting its message the way it did.

As for the ASPCA ad, the musical choice might be a little bit off, but I'm not sure that anything else in the celebrity spokeswoman's catalog would have been better. And as sad a statement it may be, I still think that appealing to people's guilt and outrage over a variety of issues brings in more money than a positive message of hope. It's the same idea that brought us the ads with Sally Struthers holding starving children in her arms and asking for us to help her fight hunger around the world. You may not be old enough to have seen Sally do her thing (she was pretty good at it), but I'm sure you've seen ads of the kind. If she was standing side by side with properly nourished adult aid workers, the heroes of international food aid, the message could have been more positive, but the money would probably have dried up. Like you, I'd like to think that we live in a world where positive reinforcement and a message of hope gets the job done. I don't see that happening, especially in the political sphere, where the Obama campaign seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

I'm sorry to hear about your writer's block, by the way. It happens to all of us and usually at just about the worst time. Luckily the prognosis for writers is much better than that of smallpox patients. :)

I look forward to your next post.

I'm sorry to post a "negative" response, but I think you've missed the boat with this post, Chris. Both of the ads you mention were placed in an effort to get people to take action in response to a negative situation. You suggest semantic changes, but semantics aside, how would you craft a message that exposes the serious problems with the American healthcare system or animal abuse, and encourages people to take action, while leaving them with a positive impression? Moreover, how would crafting a positive message be more effective? If at the end of the ad I am left with a positive impression of the future prospects of American healthcare, I'm far less likely to DO anything. My sense is that an issue ad that takes a positive tack will either have no effect whatsoever, or will increase the free rider problem by giving viewers the false sense that something is being done. Organizations like the AARP and ASPCA are fighting an uphill battle as it is, since the American attention span is notoriously short. If you're going to (a) attract someone's attention and (b) get them to take some kind of action, you have to press the right buttons in 30 seconds or less. I'm sure that the kinds of ads you advocate have been made and tested in focus groups. The reason we don't see them on the air is that they don't engender the desired response. The problem may not be with the producers of the content, but with the audience they are so desperate to reach.