When Massachusetts shocked the nation by sending Scott Brown to the US Senate, Republicans thought they had thwarted Obama’s health care hopes. Certainly it wasn’t just their 60th Senate vote that Democrats had lost. They had also surrendered control of the narrative, with unseemly legislative sausage-making obscuring the larger health-care issues.

After Brown’s victory, however, Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and congressional Democrats doubled down and found a way to move forward despite the setback. But though Democrats have won the immediate legislative struggle, they haven’t yet prevailed in the larger war for national opinion. With the Tea Partiers fuming with anti-government fury, conservative state officials thumping hoary states’ rights tubs, Republican congressfolk and presidential hopefuls vowing repeal, and former GOP standard-bearer John McCain threatening an extended senatorial sulk, the public battle promises to rage on.

To win the broader victory needed to secure the law, Democrats need to wage a full-scale persuasion campaign. That means repeatedly reminding people of the protections and benefits the new law will bring them. It also means defending the law against hyperbolic attacks from those who see super-heated opposition as their path back to political power.

As Obama showed in the last few weeks, and particularly with his masterful performance at the bipartisan health-care summit, he is eminently capable of that.

His task should be made easier by the way opponents have approached health-care reform. From the start, they have thrown any stone within reach at the legislation. The sillier of the conservative TV and radio types have denounced it as a headlong plunge into socialism. Elected Republicans, meanwhile, have regularly decried it as a government takeover of health care, an unaffordable, deficit-swelling boondoggle that will propel the country down the path to ruin.

The bill isn’t any of those things. It’s liberalism, to be sure. But socialism? Only if one doesn’t know what the word signifies. The charge of a government takeover of health care would be true if the law established a single-payer system. It doesn’t. Why, it doesn’t even include the robust public option liberals had wanted.

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