Indeed, if anything, the president has been far too reluctant to talk to the American people. Consider the Affordable Care Act. If the individual mandate is lost, the president’s failure to talk enough about the health care law over the past 2½ years will be a leading cause…

If the president had seized the initiative, the legal challenge to the individual mandate would have been far less likely to succeed. It would certainly have been far more difficult for the central argument against the mandate to break into the legal mainstream.

Had the law been popular, the notion that Congress lacks authority to regulate the timing and manner of payment for services in the huge national health care market would have been thought fanciful. Indeed, that argument has been roundly criticized by legal authorities on the left and the right as inconsistent with established law.