His *greatest* sin was handing over the Supreme Court. Second was making Romneycare the de facto Dem opening position in negotiations over healthcare reform. Behind it all was taking far too long to realize that the GOP had long ceased to be a loyal opposition with good-faith arguments.
When did he hand over the Supreme Court? Also, "Romneycare" was passed by Dem supermajorities, & Romney was merely resigned to it. He even vetoed a bunch of provisions, & Dems overrode him on nearly all of them.
It wasn't dissimilar to a plan in the 70s Dems balked at in hopes of passing UHC post-elxn, but elxn didn't go well, & it took until 2010 to try again. Regardless, it also wasn't even Obama's starting position. Lieberman wouldn't vote for a public option, so it was either remove it, or get nothing.
It’s possible that McConnell would still have won in the end if Obama had made the Garland nomination more of a public issue, asked the court to rule on “advise and consent”, or fought the issue in various other ways that were open to him. But he chose not to do any of those things.
No. You believe it would've been somehow possible to shame *McConnell* into holding a vote?! That's delusional! GOP would've replaced him as MajLdr before that happened. SCOTUS would've said it was a nonjusticiable political question. There were no other ways. There's no way to make 44+2 > 54.
Your complaint boils down to, why won't Dems do more with the power voters refused to give them? It's a constant complaint. Obama didn't get to hand-pick the 114th Congress. Voters elected GOP majorities in both houses, & Obama had to play the cards he was dealt. The cake was baked after midterms.
The only way was electing a Dem majority 114th Senate, which voters chose not to do. 2014 voters knew a SCOTUS seat was potentially on the line, bc SCOTUS is always on the line, every election. Someone can always drop dead, die in a wreck, retire, succumb to cancer, etc. Death comes for us all.
If the public couldn't be bothered to do the easy task of just electing Dems instead of GOPs, what makes you think Obama could've somehow gotten them to do the significantly harder task of shaming/otherwise pressuring the GOP? And that the GOP would've somehow caved & bent to Obama's/public's will?
And if it was that easy for Obama to motivate the public to act, why didn't he just motivate them to vote Dem instead & save everyone the trouble? You're bending over backwards to blame Obama for the failure of voters. The composition of 114th Senate was decided by 2010, 2012, & 2014 elections.
If voters had elected just net four more Dem Senators, across three elections, in any combination, the GOP wouldn't have been the majority, & not only would Obama have gotten to fill Scalia's seat, but he probably would've picked someone more like Sotomayor instead of Garland, who was a concession.
In terms of things Obama could have done in 2016, the only thing that comes to my mind is "shut down the government and veto all spending bills unless/until McConnell allows up/down vote" and I don't know how effective that would have been. Voters might have blamed Dems for the shutdown...
...and Garland might have lost an up or down vote anyway, since again, Dems were in the minority in the Senate.
Insert Simpsons meme about "we tried nothing, but we're all out of ideas"