Bartleby, the President.

In Herman Melville’s brilliant, if rather odd, short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener, the title character responds, I would prefer not to to every request that he take action no matter how trivial, no matter the source. The 24 hours that have elapsed since the leader of the free world delivered his remarks on revising the nation’s health care system have done nothing to abate my feeling that I had listened to Bartleby the President.

Let it not be said that the leader of the free world can’t build a smokin’ cadence. Let it not be said that the leader of the free world doesn’t know when to go up in volume and when to come down. Let it not be said that the leader of the free world can be beat for oratorical flourishes when he and his teleprompter are in sync.

Never let it be said that the leader of the free world is going to let his soaring rhetoric be bogged down with substance. Clearly, he would prefer not to. This is a man who was for the public option before he was against it. In the same speech. (Hint to my fellow progressives, or liberals as we were known when I was a boy, enjoy the view from under the train because that’s where we’ll be riding for the next 3-1/2 or 7-1/2 years. And the public option was just the beginning. I give you no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.)

I am authentically surprised that even Joe Wilson could have topped the laugh that followed, And while there remain some significant differences to be ironed out … as the defining moment of the speech. At the time I thought it could potentially be the defining moment of the presidency. At another point in his remarks, the leader of the free world spoke critically of cynicism. Yet what could possibly be more cynical than to introduce a “plan” with significant differences yet to be ironed out a month after his initial deadline for congressional action? Might the time to offer a plan have been three or four months ago? Perhaps he preferred not to.

The plan, its timing and its lack of specifics were not the most egregiously cynical aspects of the leader of the free world’s remarks. He made his most cynical point several times, among them:

Second, we've estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse ...

Or …

The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud...

Or …

Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.

Waste, abuse, fraud, inefficiency … these are the last refuge of the demagogue. The other hallmark of demagoguery being a certain facility for public speaking. Waste, fraud, inefficiency and abuse do exist, but I don’t believe that calling for their elimination as a funding mechanism is any more effective than proposing harnessing unicorns to replace fossil fuels. I am willing to wager that when Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus addressed the Roman Senate in the sixth century BC he called for eliminating waste, inefficiency, abuse and fraud to pay for public works projects. I would not be surprised to learn that in the election of 1800 Adams and Jefferson pilloried one another for the waste, abuse, fraud and inefficiency that blighted construction of the new capital city.

At many points in the national debate over reforming our health care system a committed and responsible leader of the nation or even his party might have chosen to offer a plan that he was willing to own, a plan which enumerated specific mechanisms for achieving its stated goals, a plan that offered realistic cost estimates and honest strategies for how to meet them.

President Obama clearly preferred not to.