Onward, he said, regardless

So the yearlong production saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.

As for the Blair House seminar, its theatrical quality was obvious even before it began. The Democrats had already decided to go for a purely partisan bill.

That exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items they are in favor. Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package.

How can that be?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American free ice cream every Sunday. Provision 2: steak on Monday. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday.

Would each provision be popular in polls? Of course.

However, suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed - say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers, 118 new boards and commissions, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the feeling about the current bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes.

That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure. Buffett's advice would be to start over and get it right.

Obama has chosen differently, however. The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican, the first time anything this size has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

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