Washington

Maybe you feel a twinge of guilt about having missed President Obama’s health care forum on Thursday. Maybe you wonder if you should have called in sick, stocked up on popcorn, printed out a few Congressional Budget Office reports and tuned in for six hours to do your civic duty.

Let me put your mind at ease. Not since Sarah Palin’s ill-starred interview with Katie Couric has a political event so perfectly anticipated a “Saturday Night Live” satire.

The president himself set the tone of self-parody. Some of Mr. Obama’s critics have suggested that he can be a wee bit pedantic, a touch too professorial. Now they have six hours of videotape to back them up. For the president, this was less a conversation than a seminar: He lectured and interrupted (“Let me just finish, Lamar”), started debates and then cut them off, ruled his opponents’ arguments out of order and always gave himself the final word.

His Republican opponents, meanwhile, were out to disprove the notion that they have no ideas on health care reform. Not so, America, not so! They have two ideas, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, which they clung to all day like Al Gore with his lockbox. Also, they had several piled-high copies of the lengthy Senate health care bill, and a slogan to go with them: “Let’s start over from a clean sheet of paper.” What would end up on that paper? Why, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, of course!