The health care fight almost killed financial reform. Now it might save it.

Congress does not multitask well. It has been three months since the Obama administration proposed an overhaul to the way this country regulates financial companies … and three months later we haven’t made any progress.

Blame it all on the health care debate, which has been all-consuming for the country and Congress. Since June 17, when Obama’s economic team first unveiled its regulatory requests in an 88-page white paper, no gains have been made. Congress has held hearings on the subject, yes, but there’s still no bill to speak of, nor does there seem to be one imminent. Because of health care, we are as vulnerable to a total financial meltdown as we were three months ago, which is just as vulnerable as we were 12 months ago, when this financial crisis first started.

Barack Obama is not a fan of this arrangement. So he drove his motorcade up to New York on Monday to give a speech to try to make somebody—especially somebody in Congress—pay attention to financial regulatory reform. The time was right—it’s been 12 months since the events of September 2008. An anniversary is a terrible thing to waste.

The speech didn’t provide any new details on Obama’s plan. He paid lip-service to expanded powers for the Fed, a consumer protection agency (the only part of his speech that had a spontaneous outburst of applause), and an FDIC-like body that could seize financial institutions outside of the FDIC’s scope (AIG (AIG), for example). All of these are key tenants of Obama’s plan, just as they were three months ago.

And yet the speech didn’t feel like a carbon copy of those that have come before. No new details were shared, sure, but the way Obama talked about financial reform was crucially different from the way he has in the past. The lessons of the health care debate have clearly been learned—there are all sorts of key words that are being shared across both reform efforts. Ironically, the health care fight that has kept financial reform from gaining traction may ultimately help it get passed.

When you compare Monday’s speech with the one Obama made on June 17, when the administration first unveiled the financial regulatory plan, the additions are striking. All of the following words weren’t in Obama’s initial regulatory reform speech but were there Monday, three months and one health care debate later. 

• “Choice”—Obama has gotten better at anticipating his opponents’ lines of attack. After reiterating his request for a new consumer protection agency in Monday’s speech, he quickly knocked down critics. “Now there are those who are suggesting that somehow this will restrict the choices available to consumers.  Nothing could be further from the truth.”

This should sound familiar. Compare that with Obama’s big health care speech to a joint session of Congress last week: “My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition.” Critics of a consumer protection agency get the same treatment as critics of the public option: a scoff, some stats, and a dismissal.

More from Monday’s address: “By setting ground rules, we'll increase the kind of competition that actually provides people better and greater choices, as companies compete to offer the best products, not the ones that are most complex or the most confusing.” That just as easily could have been copied and pasted into a health care speech.

• “Deficit”—Obama’s sharpest change over the last few months has been to start talking about regulatory reform in terms of the deficit. Part of the health care ruckus has centered on whether Obama can get a new plan passed that doesn’t cost more than it saves. “First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits—either now or in the future. Period,” Obama said in his health care address. When your deficit is projected to be $1.6 trillion this year these are the promises you have to make.

On Monday Obama started to talk about financial reform as a protective measure against a larger deficit. Obama would like you to remember that, as he said, “[w]hen my administration came through the door, we not only faced a financial crisis and costly recession, we also found waiting a trillion dollar deficit.” Some $700 billion of that deficit? The TARP, necessary only because of lax financial regulations during the Greenspan era. Thus, a better regulatory system means a safer federal coffer.

• “Status Quo”—In both health care and financial reform Obama likes to make his straw man the status quo. It makes the opposition sound lazy—all they want to do is sit around and wait to see if something blows up again—and positions Obama as a reformer and an agent of change. “Now there will be those who defend the status quo,” Obama said Monday, “There always are.” That last bit was tinged with extra meaning. It’s a sign of a wiser president, one who has already been steeled by fights elsewhere in his agenda, especially in health care reform. Again from Obama’s big health care speech: “I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.” Opponents can disagree over what should be done, but not whether something should be done.

Here the push for financial reform would seem to have an even stronger case than that for health care. We know what kinds of disasters await if we don’t fix financial regulation—we’ve already lived through one of them. Health care, meanwhile, only holds the promise of an unknown calamity—one that Obama tries to articulate by talking about wasteful spending and bankrupting the nation. But the health care crisis is an intangible one, like trying to forecast where a hurricane will land and how much damage it will bring. We already know what the financial earthquake looks like; and we have the Richter scale to prove it.

All of this language is meant to reflect today’s new political reality. The country’s chief concerns with reforming health care—and, by extension, chief concerns with the president’s agenda—are that the government will take over private industry, that the deficit will mushroom without an escape plan, and that the country will tack too hard away from the status quo, becoming some unrecognizable, socialist mutant. Three months ago, when he first introduced his regulatory reform package, Obama didn’t explicitly beat back these worries because they hadn’t been articulated yet. Instead, he just gave a cursory reminder that he believes in the fundamentals of a market economy but that markets need a little help from a government watchdog every now and then. It was the happy talk of a president without an organized opposition.

Now he knows better. The health care fight has changed the landscape and decorum of the political discussion. But it’s also equipped Obama with the tools necessary to push through future agenda items. A health care overhaul still needs to be passed or killed before the rest of the reform can begin. But at least now we know what to expect once it does.