Ruth Marcus looks at Sen. Chuck Grassley’s role in health care and finds that his ardor for a comprehensive reform plan is cooling:

“I think in my town meetings I haven’t been saying anything that I haven’t been saying for three or four months before,” Grassley said. Perhaps, but he didn’t sound terribly eager to lead the charge for a far-reaching overhaul. He described the prevailing sentiment at his town hall meetings — he held four on Monday alone — as “slow down, deliberate, do it right, maybe do it incrementally.” Grassley acknowledged that the health system is so intertwined that it is difficult to tweeze out pieces to fix one by one, but said that his goal is “do it comprehensively and still do it in a way that expresses to the people that you aren’t trying to upset the apple cart. That’s the impression people have: that they’re not going to know their health-care system as they now know it.”

Even more, he said, “health care is kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back” on broader public concern over the deficit and government intervention into the private sector. “There is real fear for the future of our country, so we have to assess our activities in light of all that fear,” he said.

Marcus tries to flatter and egg on Grassley—do it for the legacy, she coos. But Grassley is worried about how “he will be remembered.” He is telling her, because voters are telling him, that the dire issue here is our debt and financial future, not remaking a basically sound health-care system through which the vast majority of voters have insurance that they like. He is also telling her that the “legacy” is whether he will usher in a political and economic system in which the government plays an ever larger role and individual decisions aren’t so individual anymore. (Didn’t liberals use to be all about “choice” and “personal autonomy”?)

Marcus makes the same mistaken assumption that has flummoxed Obama as well as congressional Democrats: she assumes that the current health-care system is unredeemable. The public is saying otherwise—tinker and improve but don’t overhaul, they are pleading. What they do want to overhaul are Obama’s fiscal policies and big-government agenda. Grassley gets that. Marcus should cajole less and listen more. The same goes, come to think of it, for Obama.