There was high drama in the setting and most of all in the timing. After a summer of chaos, criticism and confusion, President Obama stood before Congress on Wednesday night — with three major networks broadcasting live (Fox sat out the speech in favor of the season premiere of “So You Think You Can Dance”) — and tried to seize the last word on health care reform.
“And I will not accept the status quo as a solution,” Mr. Obama said. “Not this time. Not now.”
For many viewers, it was also Mr. Obama’s first word: the issue has been subsumed in a dizzying blur of testy town halls, speeches, clashing 30-second ads and virulent, endless cable news debates. Or, as he put it, “out of this blizzard of charges and countercharges, confusion has reigned.”
Mr. Obama spoke bluntly and confidently, with his trademark professorial lilt and phrases like “Let me be clear,” but also with honed purpose and more defiance and determination than he has in recent weeks. After invoking the memory of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Mr. Obama closed with a passionate, eloquent appeal for common ground. “I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history’s test.”
In short, the president tried to do for his health care plan what he did for his candidacy when the issue of race, and the words of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., threatened to derail his presidential bid last year.
That speech, too, was a high-wire act. At a moment that even some of his supporters considered late, Mr. Obama delivered a disquisition — reassuring and dazzling — on the complexity of race relations in the United States.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Obama worked on simplicity, trying to frame his proposals in clear and unobjectionable terms. “No one should go broke because they get sick,” he said, adding later, “I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.”
And the president who prides himself on comity lashed back at opponents who have filled the airwaves with talk of “death panels.” Mr. Obama said, “It is a lie, plain and simple.”
Joint sessions of Congress have their own pomp and etiquette; even the more fervent opponents tried to be polite and applauded for the cameras. So, it was a measure of just how much anger swirls around health care that one Republican congressman, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, couldn’t contain himself and shouted “You lie” during Mr. Obama’s speech.
Throughout the night, there were Republicans frowning in their seats, but also many happy Democrats — none more radiant than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked the room joyously in a fire-engine red pantsuit — relieved, perhaps, to see someone else take the heat on health care reform. Mr. Obama, in a somber dark suit and fire-engine red tie, was perhaps more sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton’s travails in the 1990s, kissing her before and after the speech.
Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats in jumping to their feet and applauding when Mr. Obama promised that his plan would not add to the deficit. At those moments the camera was so intent on Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the moderate Republican from Maine who could be a pivotal vote for Mr. Obama, that it looked a little like a Washington version of a Fox reality show — “So You Think You Can Cross Party Lines.”
Mr. Obama tried to appeal to reason, but he didn’t stint on emotions, describing Mr. Kennedy not as the liberal lion of the Senate, but as a father who watched two of his three children battle cancer. As the camera froze on the senator’s widow, Victoria, struggling to keep her composure, Mr. Obama said, “He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick; and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance.”
It was the address that many of Mr. Obama’s supporters wished he had given earlier, but it was the kind of brinkmanship that the president, despite his nickname No Drama Obama, seems to savor.
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