You have to hand it to the Associated Press: the wire service doesn’t think its responsibility is to run the PR operation for ObamaCare. Indeed, the reporter covering a town hall in Virginia is downright snarky about the lastest sob story festival, which didn’t address any of the raging substantive policy controversies:

The health care changes that Obama called for Wednesday would reshape the nation’s medical landscape. He says he wants to cover nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, to persuade doctors to stress quality over quantity of care, to squeeze billions of dollars from spending.

But details on exactly how to do those things were generally lacking in his hour-long town hall forum before a friendly, hand-picked audience in a Washington suburb. The lingering questions underscore the tough negotiations awaiting Congress, the administration and dozens of special interest groups in the coming months. Lawmakers will return to debating the issue when they return from a one-week recess on Monday.

Some of Obama’s questioners Wednesday were from friendly sources, including a member of the Service Employees International Union and a member of Health Care for America Now, which organized a Capitol Hill rally last week calling for an overhaul. White House aides selected other questions submitted by people on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter….

Obama made no new proposals at the sometimes emotional event. But he vigorously defended his plans while fielding seven questions from the live audience at the forum and on the Internet.

After months of these sorts of vapid, feel-good displays, isn’t it time for the president to take firm positions on his plan and explain what it means? Really, we are supposed to adopt Obamacare because he allows some teary woman (a pre-selected teary woman at that) cry on his shoulder? This is entirely unhelpful if we are trying to come up with a legislative scheme that might pass and work.

Perhaps if the rest of the media demonstrated the same skepticism as the A.P. and left the infomercials to those pitchmen hawking diet miracles, the health-care debate might be more informed and the public might grasp what is at issue here.