Change is hard and often messy, and a movement and a messenger — the progressive cause and this president — whose whole identities are about change will always be linked to any discomfort that change brings.

You can’t promise more than you can produce. When the president told people they could keep their doctors and current insurance plans and that turned out not to be true, that hurt his standing more than any issue with the website ever could. To most people, that sounds dishonest, and dishonesty is an easily understood and widely reviled trait.

Republicans are going to harp on Obamacare and highlight hardship stories for as long as they feel the story has legs — and that may be a while. That happens in politics. You give your opponents a stick, and they’ll whack you with it every time.

That being said, this is not the end of days for this president or his party — no more so than shutting down the government was the end of the Republican Party.