Step back. Be neutral. Ask yourself as a detached political analyst how President Obama should have handled getting federal-government controlled health care payments done.

If your argument is that the need is so compelling as to justify immediately forcing all Americans to buy health insurance, then your argument is authoritarian, is it not? You may see yourself as a benign dictator, but there you are.

If you resist nationalizing healthcare as a great leap forward into communism, you ignore the U.S. congress and a large percentage of the people who clamor for free (to them) healthcare.

If you rely on the rule of law to resist the whims of men, you scoff at the notion that Article 1, Section 8 (The Commerce Clause) gives congress the lawful authority to impose the healthcare bill on all of us.  The counter-argument is the sweeping “if it touches on interstate commerce then we can control it” trigger that congress has relied on to expand its power since the New Deal.

Here is how President Obama messed up.  He and his party crafted a plan comprised of policy wonk language and political maneuvering to get his historic bill passed.  Instead of leading the country into this new form of government regulation, he crammed the massive bad-tasting medicine down everyone’s throat.  He succeed in passing the bill, but the heavy-handed rough-handling of the Republicans and many of the people angered the rest of us.

In short: the healing president, the above-politics president, the open president, the transcendent president scorned the very consensus his campaign promised.  He was to heal our divisions; instead, he dug a chasm between Americans.  He promised change—which included a new, better way of running the government than the partisan political fighting that supposedly he despises—but he set up this grand political street fight.

So much of the division in our country is a setup.  One party sees itself as enlightened, and that lofty status entitles them to slap the rest of us into submission.

But, this is America, where submission is not swallowed so easily.

No matter how badly President Obama wanted congress to pass nationalized healthcare, no matter how moral his followers believed their cause to be, selling the rest of us on the idea would have gained that public and political consensus leading to the unity President Obama claims he wants.  Those convinced and willing would have trusted him.  I can conclude only that he cares not one whit for the peace of unity among his countrymen.

He erred badly, and I think today, the invoice for that wreckage he caused will arrive on his desk.  He and his party will pay the bill in November.

If there is a lesson here, it is that this is America, where the law limits the power of federal government to stir disunity among the people.  Our Constitution is designed to smother these top-down firestorms of controversy so that struggles, controversies, and new ideas are tested out in a more limited fashion—in a fashion that does not split the entire nation into combating factions.

President Obama: Did you read the Federalist Papers?  Start with No. 10. Your followers will scream, “Racism!” but you brought this on yourself.