But that message—today’s temporary fear is better than yesterday’s chronic one—is hardly an easy one to sell. Instead, the president offered explanations for why healthcare.gov wasn’t working. One of the rationalizations was that the debacle was the result of the normal friction that comes from trying to do complicated things in government. “I think, what most people I hope also recognize is that when you try to do something big like make our health care system better that there’re going to be problems along the way, even if ultimately what you’re doing is going to make a whole lot of people better off. And I hope that people will look at the end product.”

Does the president really want to try to smooth over this failure by casting it as the inevitable result of trying to do big things? Sure, that gets him out of his present jam, but it’s a tough legacy to leave for any future president who wants to do ambitious work. If what healthcare.gov is going through now is the garden-variety type of “problem along the way” that comes from activist government, then you’ve just read the Republican Party’s talking points. On the other hand, if the president took real responsibility—as he did over the botched Daschle appointment—and admitted at some level that that there were unique failures in his own administration, it might leave alive the possibility that a big job like this could be carried out by a more competent team. That’s a tough thing to say for someone who is trying to dig himself out and keep his signature program alive, but it’s not possible to be sorry and not be responsible at the same time.