William A. Galston

Public opinion on the [health care law] has been remarkably stable for two years, and I don’t think anything the president says (or Romney, for that matter) will make much of a difference. Only direct experience of the Act’s effects will change people’s minds, or alternatively, confirm them.

The problem is not so much with the president's programme as with the expectations by which the people judge its results. And in this respect Mr Obama is a golfer who has knocked his tee shot into the deep rough.

No doubt the Affordable Care Act contains many details open to reasonable objection. But the key point is this: the basic architecture of Mr. Obama's legislation represents the decentralizing alternative to the single-payer system for which the Democratic base still pines.

The real question is how Mr. Obama has done in relation to previous financially induced crises. And the answer is: not badly. He averted an all-out meltdown of the American and global financial system and the onset of a second Great Depression.