It was a pleasure to hear Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts deliver a thoughtful speech Tuesday calling for a program of compulsory, affordable health insurance for Rhode Islanders.

It was a pleasure to see a politician go before an audience — at the University of Rhode Island’s Providence campus — and give a prepared, thematic address about something real, not just mouth slogans and sound bites.

More importantly, it was a pleasure to hear a leader speak in an upbeat way about the potential of government to be a constructive force in people’s lives.

Corruption and rumors of corruption sweeping through Democratic General Assembly halls have heightened voter cynicism.

Republican Governor Carcieri often portrays government as bloated, a threat to taxpayers.

Into this scene strides Democrat Roberts, a former state senator who is a newcomer to high office, striking a tone of intelligent idealism as she called for change that would allow the state to balance its budget and provide health care both the government and individuals could afford.

“I am not saying it will be easy, or that it will happen overnight,” she told an audience of health, business, political and academic figures. “But it can happen if we put aside the rancor, the posturing, the pandering, and the personal agenda and work together — the governor with the legislature … Medicaid with doctors and hospitals; health care providers with insurance companies; insurance companies with small businesses.”

She added, “Where is the vision? Rather than whittling away at our safety net and trimming at the edges of the personnel budget, we should be thinking about the long-term role of government.”

Roberts, 50, declared, “Everyone should have the care they need, when they need it, and in the most effective and low-cost setting.”

She warned, “Doing nothing about health care, standing still, waiting for someone else to lead, waiting for the winds of change to blow us in the right direction, risks the lives and the livelihoods of Rhode Islanders.”

She pledged to work to bring interested parties together to devise a five-year plan.

As to where the money will come from to finance the program, Roberts provided only a couple of possibilities — for example, better primary coverage and less dependence on expensive emergency room services — and had no estimate of how much the state might have to shell out. She intends to submit legislation in the 2008 Assembly. By then, she’ll have to know the costs.

Even to get the different health players to work together is a challenge. They could tell her to take a hike. But her husband, Thomas Roberts, told me, “She can be a very convincing person … Elizabeth has a very strong will.”

As a byproduct, if she pulls this off she certainly could mount a strong bid for governor in 2010.

In any event, I applaud Roberts’ initiative. It’s nice to see a politician trying to do something that actually would help people.

John F. Kennedy used to be fond of quoting something Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1936:

“The immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Too often around here, government is frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com