As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 9th, 2010:

How the president debates health care.

‘When I use a word,’” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

Like the famously cracked egg in the Lewis Carroll fantasy, Barack Obama refuses to be bound by conventional English. Words like “choice” and “competition” are thrown around in ways that mean the opposite of how most Americans understand them. Once Americans do understand how he’s been using a word, moreover, it changes—in the way that a second “stimulus” suddenly becomes a “jobs bill.” Other words simply disappear.

The Dumpty dynamic is especially pronounced in the home stretch of the health-care debate. During a boisterous rally yesterday at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, the president thumped that the time for “an up-or-down vote on health care” has come, and today he follows up with remarks in St. Louis.

In the interests of furthering understanding of this debate, here are five words Mr. Obama now avoids unless forced to comment by some reporter or Republican lawmaker:

• Reconciliation. Last Wednesday the president called for Senate Democrats to use reconciliation to ram a health-care bill through Congress. In the same way he called for a second stimulus back in November without ever saying it, however, “reconciliation” did not cross Mr. Obama’s lips as he endorsed it. Instead, he spoke of a vote that is “nothing more than a simple majority.”

The White House Web page suggests the last time the president uttered the word “reconciliation” in the context of health care was a dismissive answer to a question from John McCain during the bipartisan summit. “I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate,” he told the Arizona Republican—notwithstanding that Americans seem very much interested in the procedures that led to the Cornhusker Kickback or a federal judgeship for a wavering House Democrat’s brother. Not to mention Mr. Obama’s own statement in October 2007 that “we are not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-one strategy.”

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