Paging A Different President Obama

Non-fire-breathing Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein actually understated the case earlier this month, when he could finally take it no more and wrote:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
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The nation needs to see a different President Obama next Wednesday when he addresses a joint session of Congress.
His laid-back attempt to take the high road just isn't working.
It was all very noble and everything to try to be bipartisan. It was most excellently un-Bush-like to actually ask Congress to try its hand at legislating. It was admirably high-minded to attempt conciliation, to adopt a professorial role, and stay at 30,000 feet.
But no more. The Republican Party and the national discourse have been hijacked by unhinged zealots. The Democratic congressional leadership has shown itself to be incoherent, incapable and corrupted. So for Obama, it's either time to fight back or give up.
Obama could, I guess, back off on everything remotely controversial in his health care proposal, throw the public option and universal coverage and end-of-life counseling overboard, and try to get everyone to find common ground. But even that wouldn't appease his critics. They won't stop fighting just because he does. Their goal is for Obama to lose.
Alternately, Obama could commit himself to some specifics, call out his critics, and remind people why all this is so damned important.
Here's one thing he could say: I'm not going to chase after the crazies on the right anymore. I cannot do business with these people, try as I may. I reach out and they accuse me of being a socialist who wants to pull the plug on grandma.
He could bolster this argument with nearly endless examples of the extreme, vitriolic and outright balmy things leading Republicans have been saying about him and his plan lately. Heck, just yesterday, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe told a town hall audience that Obama is disarming the military, is destroying everything good about America and is determined to turn foreign terrorists loose on U.S. soil. LinkHere