Whenever President Obama endures a setback or is stymied by the GOP-controlled Congress, he’s all but pronounced as finished by some members of the media, and that will only increase as we progress in his second term, the lame-duck one. But when Obama holds a press conference to decry the defeat of gun background checks, he isn’t just arguing that issue. That’s just the battle, and he wants to win the war. Every time the President appeals to the common sense and decency of the American people, every time he speaks to the future and progress, he’s putting the country on a path that resembles his vision. The President is playing the long game.

The bigger picture is that the Republicans will likely maintain its Congressional majority in the midterm elections in 2014 because of gerrymandering, but what if Hillary Clinton runs in 2016 and the more moderate Republicans all take a pass? That could be a landslide that completes Obama’s goal, that gives his party the wherewithal to drive the nation’s politics for decades. That’s the long game, that’s his far-reaching hope. 

Whenever you consider Obama’s presidency, sure, think of universal health care, energy independence and the drawing down of two wars. But also recall the thesis sentence from his candidacy in 2008, which he articulated to the Reno Gazette-Journal, a remark that ruffled stalwarts of both parties at the time: 

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Mr. Obama told the newspaper. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.”