The president scans the headlines on his way back to the White House on Jan. 18.
"Look," the President said. "Even if we hadn't tackled health care, this was going to be a tough year." We were in the Oval Office, talking about how health care reform had become such a mess. It was the Friday before his first anniversary in office, the Friday before a Republican named Scott Brown demolished the assumptions of Barack Obama's presidency by winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and ending the Democrats' filibuster-proof dominance. It was a Friday when the President's decision to go all in on health care was beginning to seem like a disastrous gamble.
