PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - - President Barack Obama ventured into the summer's unpredictable town hall meetings on health care Tuesday, facing a polite audience, while lawmakers elsewhere continued to confront enraged citizens - a contrast that showed how far the administration still must go to bridge the divide.
The president used his appearance Tuesday at a high school in Portsmouth, N.H., to frame his view of the health care crisis, appeal to wavering Americans and counter what he said were outlandish fallacies in arguments by Republicans and conservatives.
But at the same time, the outpouring of anger continued from those who see health care reform as misguided federal policy or even destructive to the country's fabric.
"I think it is very hard, because [Democrats] don't have the message machine the Republicans do," said George Lakoff, a University of California-Berkeley linguistics professor who has advised some Democrats on how to sharpen their message. "The Democrats still believe in Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the truth they will come to the right conclusion."
In Missouri, hecklers at Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill's town hall meeting got so rowdy that security officials removed two people. In Pennsylvania, a protester put out by Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter predicted God would harshly judge him and his "damn cronies on Capitol Hill."
As skepticism, suspicion and misunderstanding of the Obama proposals run deep and wide across the country, the White House plan to counter it was on full display Tuesday.
"The way politics works sometimes is that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they'll create bogeymen out there that just aren't real," Obama said. "We can't let them do it again."
The White House pledged to keep hammering away with its set of explanations and arguments. If people only understood, one senior administration official suggested, their idea would win the day.
"Our challenge each and every day," press secretary Robert Gibbs said, "is to go out and make sure people understand that doing nothing costs the American people more in health care spending. ... It makes our budgetary problems worse, it causes people to lose their coverage and lose their doctor. And we can change all that."
Obama's appearance Tuesday came as the White House mounted a campaign using techniques honed during the 2008 presidential campaign. Included are Web videos, fact-checks and rapid-response efforts.
