These are real deliverables, and Obama is right to reaffirm and clarify them for voters, especially after so many of the law’s virtues have been obscured, both by Republican demagoguery and the implementation fiascos. As Ganz put it in an email: “One of the big ‘values’ in health care provision is reliability, security, being there—which is exactly what this whole debacle has undermined. [In this case] ‘making it work’ actually has moral content.”

But the program that Obama and his team are desperately trying to make work is also based on moral claims about human dignity and distributive justice—many of which, until recently, were pretty bipartisan. If Obama recognizes that “the basic social compact in America” is now under attack, why can’t the basic social compact in America get its own three-week messaging calendar at some point? The vast inequalities and decreasing mobility in our society got their day in court Wednesday. Can he focus on how our common humanity and the advantages many Americans receive through the dumb luck of birth should inform their obligations to one another on a Thursday and a Friday?

The main argument against launching such an effort is that it would be politically hazardous—that any overt set of moral claims defending a program like the ACA would be tantamount to confirming one conservative thinker’s charge that it’s just “a massive, massive income redistribution.”