The President's admirers, especially in the media, consider him some speechmaker. He is reasonably good, by post-Reagan standards. If only his speeches had content as well as cadence! The content-less speech, which you can't remember when it's over except that it sure sounded good, is the Barack Obama specialty. Audiences eat it up with spoons. He promises change, promises unity, promises transformation. It sounds so good you want to march.

March where? That's the eternal question with Obama. You won't find him, I venture, trying to shoot down in public the Congressional Budget Office's arithmetic -- first, because he knows we know it's no GOP hatchet job; second, because meeting telling objection with telling reply isn't his stock in trade. He inspires. He rouses. He sends you airborne -- without telling you what it's going to cost when you come down.

That's the detail stuff -- cost. Obama seems to have decided we don't care about details; we trust him to do the backstage work that makes everything come out right.

The beauty of the Obama phenomenon -- and indeed there's a kind of beauty and unintentional charm to it, as well as vitality -- is this: Americans last year were ready for a spot of inspiration -- a jolt of moral Tabasco. Obama likes to talk about the problems he inherited from "his predecessor," George W. Bush. What he never mentions is the automatic clearance he received from Bush, after a long, mostly flat presidency -- to soar over the earth like a bird. Soar he did.

Birds, alas, however graceful in flight, have to come down to earth, where a fact is a fact is a fact; where the Congressional Budget Office tells us -- without actually telling us -- that there's no such thing as a smooth path to Happy Healthcare Land.

Good ideas -- with higher respect for the private sector than the Washington Democrats display -- can be found in abundance: none smooth, none easy, none foolproof. The challenge is to start talking and sorting out rather than dictating: wham, wham, do it my way. The Democratic way!

Brain surgery is the most methodical, no-nonsense enterprise anyone ever saw. What's the matter with politicians who propose to slice up, without X-rays or MRI, the best health care system in the world? No brains? Or too many for their own good?