The Time For Talk Is Over.

“The time for talk is over. It’s time to vote.”  That’s what President Obama shouted to a crowd in St. Charles Mo. on Wednesday.

Unless of course, you’re on the “right” side of the issue like he is.  Evidently, everyone else should simply shut up and go along.

At a speech at Arcadia University, on Monday March 8, he encouraged students: “”So I need you to knock on doors. Talk to your neighbors. Pick up the phone.”

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have been invited to the White House to discuss health legislation today.

On Monday Obama will travel to northeastern Ohio near the hometown of an uninsured cancer patient named Natoma Canfield, one of his symbols of the need for reform.   Undoubtedly, he has chosen a better example than his last.  Presumably, he’ll communicate there in some sort of vocal form.

I guess he really is taking a page out of Woodrow Wilson’s book, Leaders of Men.

“Men are not led by being told what they don’t know. Persuasion is a force, but not information; and persuasion is accomplished by creeping into the confidence of those you would lead. Their confidence is gained by qualities which they can recognize, by arguments which they can assimilate: by the things which find easy entrance into their minds and are easily transmitted to the palms of their hands or the ends of their walking-sticks in the shape of applause.”

After all

“The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question as to the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. The power will fail if it be misapplied; it will be misapplied if it be not suitable both in its character and in its method to the nature of the materials upon which it is spent; but that nature is, after all, only its means. It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”

He told his audience in Missouri: “The folks in Washington don’t understand that I know they’re not going to be popular. They can’t believe I’m doing them. See, they just think I’m an idiot that I’m doing something that’s not immediately popular.”

It might not be popular, but he knows what’s best for us, whether we do or not.

“So, I don’t know how the politics plays. But here’s what I do know: the American people will be more secure with this reform; our country will be stronger because of this reform. I don’t know about the politics, but I know it is the right thing to do and that’s why I’m fighting so hard to get it done.”

And he’s willing to keep talking until we get it.