His civil rights initiatives. Talk about difficult. People marvel at his abilities to glad hand and cajole and simply stay with it to at least get minority consensus - in his case, he largely had to corral his own party, so it was more of a necessity.

IMO, blame whoever or whatever we want for the completely partisan fashion in which ACA was passed, but it cost the dems dearly in ‘10 and ‘12 (though not the WH), and Ocare was on life support. It came within a hair of going away.

Necessity and real-politic have to matter. If repubs outflanked dems then, dems need to take stock of that and learn from it. They simply never do - some of the roadblocks they put up in front of themselves in this election show that.

My point is not to be overly critical of O’s HC effort in 2009 and ‘10. It is to take a hard look at that and learn lessons now, when IMO consensus building has never been more important. Joe’s not a bad guy to have at the helm for that. Govern as though you have something still to prove, not as though you have a hard mandate to do much of anything. The mandate is mostly to try to move us off the cliff of hyper-partisanship.