It's absolutely true that people who believed Hillary Clinton would be a decent or even strong nominee need to think why that got that wrong. Laying the entire blame at the feet of Russia and the FBI is not sufficient. The biggest reason things went wrong were her own choices and her own weaknesses.

That's an important Obama accomplishment: he raised taxes back to Bill Clinton levels, and made a major dent in inequality doing so. That's certain to be reversed, that's going to disappear. The Republicans are going to slash the rich's taxes.

Republicans fighting back against changes Obama made means those changes are important, as with most of the major progress in American history.

Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

I'm convinced in 100 years Obama will have an important place in the civic pantheon of American life.

One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.

We're not going to be living in a world of abundant coal power in a hundred years.