Take health-care reform. Ten years hence, perhaps, it will be seen as the signal achievement of the Obama years. But for now, it’s an unpopular law that took a divisive year to enact, that liberals and conservatives loathe, that is full of bureaucratic and fiscal IEDs, and that drained attention from dealing with the economy. If you disagree, look at Obama’s speech last week in Cleveland. In 47 minutes, he mentioned health care for about 25 seconds.

Obama misread the clock. Obama was warned before the election that Republicans would try to slow-walk his every nominee, but he never figured out a way around the problem. The administration was slow to staff up, which hampered everything, especially the impact of the stimulus. “Shovel ready” projects identified in the spring of 2009 are often still “unshoveled” because officials aren’t in place to approve them, says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “The fact is,” he says, “Obama never really ran anything, even legislatively.” Neither has his closest adviser, message guru David Axelrod.

This might explain why Obama blew so much capital so quickly. In the spring of 2009, the White House strong-armed House Democrats into voting for a cap-and-trade environmental bill, even though it was clear the Senate wouldn’t go along. With this one early vote, the president exhausted his chits with Blue Dog, swing-state moderates and the coal-staters, who were then reluctant to help him on other matters, like the tax changes he wants, and who are refusing now to defend him or the party back home.