President Obama has just completed the most arduous act of community organizing of his career. Two hundred and nineteen of his neighbors down the street joined together in the House of Representatives to pass historic health care legislation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it happen, but Obama worked harder and more intensely than he has on any other issue of his presidency. He made 92 direct pitches to Democratic members of the House, according to a White House tally. Last week he gave three speeches, culminating in an appeal to fellow Democrats more personal and philosophical than any he's given since taking office. 
 
 This week the legislation goes to the Senate, where it will be difficult for Republicans to derail the bill (though they might be able to delay it). 
 
 "We rose above the weight of our politics. ... We are still a people capable of doing big things," said the president. "I know this wasn't an easy vote for a lot of people but it was the right vote." 
 
 No matter what happens next, Obama's sucessful effort to reshape the country's social safety net is a turning point in his presidency. This is his project. Unlike the bailout of the auto companies or the stimulus package, health care reform was not a response to an emergency. Whether the Obama presidency is a diptych, triptych, or something even more complex, the first hinge will mark the time before health care and the time after health care. 
 
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 Obama didn't just work harder to clear this hurdle. He worked deeper, making his final pitch to provide insurance to 32 million people on moral grounds in a more focused way than he has in the last year of debate. Twice this past week he went to the presidential library for moral ballast. On Friday he quoted Teddy Roosevelt: "Aggressively fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." On Saturday he built his speech to House Democrats around a quote from Lincoln that touched on the same sentiment—doing the right thing despite the odds. "I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true. I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have." 
 
 Presidents like to compare themselves to their successful predecessors. It adds to the nobility of their cause and allows them to bask in their reflected glory. But it was clear that when Obama spoke to House Democrats, he was not just reaching for rhetorical tricks. He spoke in personal terms and at length about their collective moral obligation. 
 
 He talked about the impulse that moved them all to get into politics and that made them become Democrats. "Something inspired you to get involved, and something inspired you to be a Democrat instead of running as a Republican," he said. "Because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself, 'I believe in an America in which we don't just look out for ourselves, that we don't just tell people you're on your own.' " 
 
 The push to pass this bill has not only pushed him to use all of the tools of his office—speeches to the public, town halls with members of Congress, addresses to joint sessions of Congress, Q&A sessions shown over the Internet, Air Force One trips for undecided lawmakers, hours of one-on-one cajoling—but it has also pushed him rhetorically. It's one thing to say Republicans aren't participating in the health care process. The argument Obama made Saturday went further. As Obama framed it, only Democrats care about those less fortunate. 
 
 The president continued his personal pitch, empathizing with lawmakers who had sacrificed so much for their office but often felt empty for the sacrifice. Tallying up all the promises lawmakers have made during their careers, Obama offered this one redeeming act to counter the feelings of emptiness: "Every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself. And this is the time to make true on that promise." ||||| President Barack Obama on Wednesday night tacked to the right with appeals for tax cuts for small business and new investments in off-shore oil drilling and nuclear power. He tacked to the left with renewed vows to let gays serve in the military and to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. 
 
 He sounded at times like a Bill Clinton-style centrist, at others like a bank-bashing populist. He taunted Republicans, and also presented himself as a lonely tribune of cooperation and bipartisan civility in Washington. 
 
 In a favorable light, his State of the Union speech may have revealed the mind of a leader who has never cared much about traditional ideological categories and is determined to create his own results-oriented composite of ideas from across the spectrum. 
 
 Less charitably, the address could be interpreted as the work of a president who is desperately improvising by touching every political erogenous zone he and his advisers can think of. 
 
 Under either judgment, however, it was inescapable that his 69-minute speech — for all the rush of words and policy ideas — was a document of downsized ambitions for a downsized moment in his presidency. 
 
 It was presented to the Congress and a national audience with all of Obama’s usual fluency and brio. There were flashes of wit, as when he noted ruefully that “by now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics.” 
 
 And there were flashes of defiance, with Obama delivering what the White House clearly intended to be the headline quote: “We don’t quit; I don’t quit.” 
 
 But there was no mistaking throughout this box-checking, loosely bundled speech how different the political context in the winter of 2010 is from the winter of 2009. 
 
 Obama came into office promising to shatter expectations of what was possible in Washington. The talk then was of a presidential “big bang” — health care, global warming, and financial reform legislation all in one year — and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel boasted that his motto was to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” 
 
 With the big-bang strategy officially a failure, Obama’s speech revealed in real-time a president groping for a new and more effective one. The speech was woven with frequent acknowledgements that the laws of political gravity applied to him after all. 
 
 The first and most pressing legislative goals he identified were a comparatively small jobs bill that has passed the House but is languishing in the Senate, and a Bill Clinton-style menu of tax incentives for business. 
 
 Health care, the consuming issue of 2009 and the one on which Obama aides insisted they should be judged, did not show up until more than halfway through. ||||| “We feel confident about the site working now as it was intended,” Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director, told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd on Monday morning, following the claim by Jeffrey Zients, who led the Web site turnaround, that “night and day” improvements had been made. 
 
 Press secretary Jay Carney announced that the site had weathered 375,000 visitors in the first 12 hours of Monday. He called it “significantly improved” and said it was functioning “effectively for the vast majority of users.” Carney spoke of a “vast improvement” and said the White House had reached its goal that “the vast majority of users are able to access the site and have it function effectively.” 
 
 ABC News’s Jonathan Karl needled him. “Is it mission accomplished?” 
 
 Carney knew better than to raise that banner. “We believe we made the important progress that we set out to make,” he said. 
 
 Conveniently, figures leaked Monday indicated that 100,000 people signed up for insurance on HealthCare.gov in November, quadruple October’s dismal result. Democratic lawmakers came out of hiding and spoke of the improvements with a spirit that had eluded them in the weeks since the Web site crashed on launch. 
 
 But the real gauge of HealthCare.gov’s improvement was Republicans’ response — or lack thereof. When the House returned from Thanksgiving recess on Monday afternoon, the GOP speakers on the floor essentially ignored the Web site, instead returning to their earlier denunciations of Obamacare overall and President Obama in general. 
 
 Rep. Virginia Foxx (N.C.) yammered on about the employer mandate. Rep. Ted Poe (Tex.) likened the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran to the 1938 Munich pact. Rep. Michael Burgess (Tex.) complained about the health-care exchanges. And Rep. Joe Wilson (S.C.) criticized Obama’s job-creation record. The issue that had been the Republicans’ rallying cry for the previous eight weeks suddenly vanished. 
 
 Carney was right not to claim victory. The rollout of Obamacare this fall, particularly the president’s broken promise that people who like their health plans would be able to keep them, have damaged Obama’s credibility, probably permanently. Many people — including young voters who disproportionately supported Obama — have lost their catastrophic-coverage plans and now must pay significantly more to get new, bigger plans. And it’s still not certain that the health-care exchanges at the heart of the law will be viable. 
 
 But fixing the Web site after its embarrassing launch means that opponents of the Affordable Care Act have lost what may have been their last chance to do away with the law. And supporters can rule out the worst-case scenario: Obamacare isn’t going away. Even some conservatives have begun to tiptoe away from an opposition to the law that looked much like sabotage. 
 
 Last week, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a Senate candidate, told a local radio station, Z Politics, that “a lot of conservatives say, ‘Nah, let’s just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own.’ But I don’t think that’s always the responsible thing to do. . . . I think we need to be looking for things that improve health care overall for all of us. And if there is something in Obamacare, we need to know about it.” 
 
 In the White House briefing room, too, there was a change in tone. The death watch for Obamacare had been suspended and the conversation turned to other possible problems: Will HealthCare.gov be ready for a surge in enrollments later this month? Why hasn’t the administration started a campaign to direct more people to the site? 
 
 “You now say it’s working with private-sector velocity,” said Fox News’s Ed Henry. “Can you reasonably keep up that pace in the days ahead?” 
 
 “The answer,” Carney said, “is yes.” 
 
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– Barack Obama earned a historic victory when the House passed health care reform last night. How did he do it and what does it mean? Here’s what people are saying: “Obama didn't just work harder to clear this hurdle. He worked deeper,” writes John Dickerson of Slate. For the first time he made a cause personal, framing it in moral terms, and urging lawmakers to risk sacrificing their jobs to do the right thing. He showed a newfound “combative stubbornness,” writes Peter Nicholas of the LA Times. Republicans thought this would be his “Waterloo,” but Obama proved “that a president who picks a goal, adopts a battle plan and sticks with it” is tough to beat. The president basically schmoozed his way to victory, says Jennifer Bendery on Roll Call. Through one-on-one talks and social events, he flipped even tough votes like Dennis Kucinich. Republicans have delighted in calling Obama ineffective or incompetent, but that’s all over, writes Jonathan Chait of The New Republic; Obama has sealed his place in history. “He will never be plausibly compared with Jimmy Carter.”