Maybe he’s 27 steps ahead of everybody again and will demonstrate that with his health care reform.

I feel like, coming from the Senate and perhaps overcompensating for the Bush-Cheney-DeLay era, Obama has been a little too deferential to Congress.

1) was a major priority for me – and, even more importantly, restoring some kind of sanity to the Gitmo/torture/etc. aspect of the Bush presidency – and we have gotten very little of that. Holder’s recent actions have been somewhat encouraging, but we’ll see.

I am mostly indifferent to 2). Americans simply don’t care that they’re destroying the planet, and it’s vanishingly unlikely that we’ll ever see meaningful action on climate change. If I get worked up about that, I’ll never sleep again. So I just ignore it.

And we’ll get 3). It may be less than ideal, but there’s no real turning back now. The entire Democratic caucus needs this, so they’ll see it done. However imperfect it is, I will take a bunt single at this point and hope someone else can drive the runner home.

But the places where Obama has real control over policy (rather than the made-up idea that he can just legislate from the Oval Office) are things like war, torture, DADT, transparency, and the Supreme Court. And so far I am largely unimpressed.