Where Obama went wrong

I had some hope for Obama when he was first elected.  He said a lot of the right things about how partisan our politics were and tackling problems that he could get bipartisan support on.

Then he decided to push healthcare reform.

It is obvious from the reactions in the media and the statements made by Republicans across this nation that he had no bipartisan support on this issue.  This has hurt him in multiple ways.
1) It changed Obama from a political outsider that would change how Washington worked (which is how he ran his campaign) into a liar like all other politicians because he wasn't working on bipartisan issues like he promised. 
2) This also alienated Obama from a significant segment of the moderate and independent voters that helped get him elected because they either didn't like the healthcare reforms Obama proposed or viewed the entire bill as a waste of time and money.
3) Because of all the controversy around ObamaCare, Obama had to spend pretty much all his political capital to get his healthcare bill passed and this has crippled his ability to get other legislation passed.  Right now there are almost no Republicans that want to be seen working with Obama on any issue.
4) The fight to get ObamaCare passed resulted in lots of compromises that significantly weakened the bill from its original form.  Now Obama will always be associated with this weakened reform that will likely not work very well.

With all of these negatives of healthcare reform, Obama would have been much smarter to focus on something like tax reform.  Here is what I think would have happened if he had done tax reform instead of healthcare reform.
1) He would appear to be addressing an issue with bipartisan support.  There are numerous Republicans that also want tax reform.  Yes, there would be differences of opinion on what needed fixed but he could have found some support among Republicans.
2) He could claim that addressing tax reform would help our lagging economy (I don't know that it would have really helped the economy but tax reform would have appeared to help the economy more than healthcare reform).  I believe that addressing healthcare while the economy was down made Obama appear disconnected from the needs of normal citizens and is what really cost the Democrats the midterm election.
3) Tax reform would not have been as easy for Republicans to rip apart and as headline grabbing as healthcare reform was.  Raising taxes on the rich and removing abused deductions is a lot less sensational than "death panels" and socialism.

So this is how Obama went from an unstoppable force that had better than 60% approval to where we are today with approval ratings in the 40-50% range and significant questions of whether he will get re-elected.

NOTE:  Personally, I think that healthcare in this country has significant issues that need to be addressed.  However, regardless of whether Obama was "doing the right thing," he crippled himself with the fight to pass his healthcare reform and ended up with a crippled form of the original bill that has little ability to fix our core healthcare problems.

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