In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

None of this served his cause of health care reform or his political standing. The droop in Obama’s job approval numbers isn’t remotely as large or precipitous as the Beltway’s incessant doomsday drumbeat suggests. But support for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him. Perhaps the most revealing of all the poll findings came in an end-of-August Washington Post query asking voters what “single word” first came to mind to describe their “feelings” about Obama and his health care proposals. For Obama, the No. 1 feeling was “good.” For the policy package he’d been ostensibly selling all summer, the No. 1 feeling was “none.”

It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.