Health Care Overhaul Tops Week’s Agenda in Washington

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• JIM LEHRER:

  And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

  David, how has President Obama's big public push on health care done so far this week?

  DAVID BROOKS, columnist, New York Times: The public part, not so great. I mean, if you had to rate how they're doing, inside Washington, they're actually doing pretty well. They've got all these committees working on the bill, and the big story is they're not going to pass it this summer. We're going to have to wait until the fall until — and so that seems like a big setback.

  But when you actually look at what the committees are doing and the substance of the bills, there's actually much more overlap that I would have thought. And so I think, you know, they're going to get the Blue Dogs, the centrists.

  I would suspect within Washington right now there's a very good chance they will get health care reform because of the way the bills are cohering.

  Outside of Washington, the public part, that's where the danger is. If you look at where the American people are, a slim majority now say — disapprove of Obama's approach to health care. Among independents, 66 percent think it's too big government.

  So public support is eroding. But among Democrats in Washington, there's a procession going on.

• JIM LEHRER:

  Do you see it the same way, Mark?

  MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Not completely. I think, first of all, Jim, that the president on his own presentation this week did not have a good week.

• JIM LEHRER:

  He did a bunch of television interviews, including one with us.

• MARK SHIELDS:

  With us.

• JIM LEHRER:

  And then he had his news conference. He's been everywhere.

• MARK SHIELDS:

  But the news conference was the wall to wall. That was the national — I mean, people who were wise enough and shrewd enough to watch the NewsHour saw something else.

  But in that presentation, I really thought that — all I could think of was, Adlai Stevenson once said when he was introducing John Kennedy — remember in classical times, whenever Cicero spoke, the people reacted and said, "He spoke so well." But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, "Let us march." And after the Wednesday presentation, there was nobody saying, "Let us march."

• JIM LEHRER:

  No marching?

• MARK SHIELDS:

  It was a listless, overly academic — and at a time when you really need to distil and to explain to people and to inspire and motivate them and educate them, I think the president, who was a great professor, according to everybody who sat in his classroom, failed the test on Wednesday night.