It seems self-evident that a speech is not a bill and a pep rally is not governance. But Obama and his media cheerleaders, who attribute great significance to the president’s address this week, seem only dimly aware of that truism. The Obama team must have anticipated this criticism and so spun it beforehand that we would “know where the president stands” and we’d get “details.” Well, as it turns out, not so much.

The fundamental questions remain. As the Wall Street Journal noted:

President Barack Obama said in his address to Congress on Wednesday that the health overhaul should cost about $900 billion over a decade and not increase the budget deficit. It was the strongest signal he has given on the total tab, but Mr. Obama left unclear how he wants to cover it.

He singled out two areas to tap for funding. Most would come from squeezing money out of Medicare, particularly by cutting payments to private insurance companies that cover some of the elderly via so-called Medicare Advantage plans. The president also endorsed new fees for insurance companies on their most generous health plans. He stressed that most of the plan will be paid for by money already being spent on health care.

But based on early estimates, those two items won’t be enough, and earlier White House proposals weren’t addressed in the speech.

[. . .]

The White House said the speech wasn’t intended to spell out every aspect of how the president would pay for the plan. Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the president was still considering a series of other ways to fund the plan that he outlined earlier.

It is easy to see why the White House is so vague and the president’s speech so lacking in details: in order to pay for a trillion-dollar plan, you wind up with some very unpalatable choices.

And even on the bone to conservatives—tort reform—the president’s fine print is “hazy,” the Washington Post tells us:

When President Obama broached medical malpractice laws in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, it was one of the few times that Republican lawmakers stood to applaud. But the ideas the president embraced stopped considerably short of the federal limits on awards in malpractice lawsuits that the GOP and the nation’s physicians have sought for years.

Obama said he wants the Department of Health and Human Services to encourage states to experiment with ways to reduce malpractice litigation. But he was sketchy about the details of the “demonstration projects” he has in mind.

At some point, the White House will need to get serious about governing—that is, developing policy and negotiating its details with skeptical lawmakers. We are a long way from that.