Sounds Good, Means Nothing

From William Murchison at Real Clear Politics:
On Monday, the President assured the American Medical Association that "If we fail to act, premiums will climb higher, benefits will erode further, the rolls of the uninsured will swell to involve millions more Americans ."
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.