This collection contains collaborative Election crawls performed by IA. ||||| 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." ||||| Obama's Place In History 
 
 Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don't know what will follow in his presidency, and it's quite possible that some future event--a war, a scandal--will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has. 
 
 The last two generations have no model for such a president. The only two other Democratic presidents of the last four decades are Jimmy Carter, a failure, and Bill Clinton, who enjoyed modest successes but failed in his most significant legislative fight. Obama, who helped pull the country out of a depression and reshaped the health care system, has already accomplished far more than Clinton. (This isn't necessarily Clinton's fault--he lacked the votes to break a Republican filibuster that Obama has--but the historical convention is to judge a president by what he and the Congress achieve together.) He will never be plausibly compared with Jimmy Carter. 
 
 Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. Through determined advocacy, and against special interest opposition, they put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and physical security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart. Health care experts for decades have bemoaned the impossibility of such reforms--the system is wasteful, but the very waste creates a powerful constituency for the status quo. Finally, the Democrats have begun to untangle the Gordian knot. It's a staggering political task and substantive achievement. 
 
 The template of a powerful, historically consequential Democratic president is unfamiliar to many of us. Certainly the Republicans have no real idea how to deal with it. Look at Bill Kristol's taunting editorial in the Weekly Standard: 
 
 After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” 
 
 And presiding over this three-ring circus of liberal incompetence was President Barack Obama, who stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Lyndon Johnson as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. Have we had in modern times a president who was so out of his depth? 
 
 It occurs to me that Bill Kristol stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Irving Kristol as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. But I digress. The broader point is that the Republicans have spent a year chortling over the inevitable collapse of Obama, and they seem to cling even more tightly to that fantasy--"Incompetence"? "Out of his depth"?--as it slips further away. 
 
 Obama's accomplishments do not, and probably will not, meet those of Johnson, let alone Franklin Roosevelt. It's worth noting that he has smaller majorities, and governs in an era when the republican Party is far more ideologically radical and unified in opposition. A measure of that greater discipline and partisan unity can be seen in the fact that Social Security and Medicare both won significant Republican support, and both were far more liberal and government-centric in their design. 
 
 We can't know what the future holds in store for Obama. It's entirely possible that Republicans will gain control of the House in November and block any further domestic progress, unemployment will stay high, and Republicans will win the White House in 2012. Yet he's already left his imprint on history. 
 
 RELATED 
 
 John B. Judis on the real lesson of the health care victory. 
 
 Michelle Cottle describes the Republican implosion.
– 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.”