When Bill Clinton became president, his top legislative priority was health care. When Barack Obama became president, he first had to prevent a depression, but then he too turned to health care.

The next Democratic president should choose a different priority.

It’s still true that too many Americans suffer from inadequate or expensive insurance coverage, and the next president should certainly look to make progress on health care. But presidents must make choices. Realistically, they have to pick one or two sweeping bills to try to push through Congress in their first year.

To argue that health care should be atop the list, you can’t simply say that it is important. You need to believe that it’s so much more important than everything else — climate change, voting rights, immigration, education, wage stagnation, the unfair tax system — that health care deserves to be the Democrats’ only top priority over four decades of presidencies. All those other issues would once again take a back seat.

And that would be a mistake, because the both moral and political case for some other issues is now stronger than it is for health care.