The beauty of triangulation is that you only have to do it on a few issues to win the goodwill that lets you be a tough partisan on others. Most obviously, Obama could have helped defuse fear of too-big liberal government by leading a charge to find and cut the waste in Washington. (He could, for example, have embraced the sequester cuts if he was allowed to apportion them.) If Congressional Dems squawked, so much the better for his popularity and power. But perhaps we elected a President who isn’t interested in how the nuts and bolts of government work–as long as he worries about the big legislation, what goes on in the bureaucratic boxes is a second order problem, right? If that’s what Obama thinks, his health care rollout is, as they say, a teachable moment.