Sigh. Obama’s claim that he never campaigned on the public option has received a lot of flack, and rightly so. It was in his official campaign proposal, and he did invoke it many times this year.

What is true is that the Obama inner circle never, in fact, cared much about the public option. But they allowed, you might say encouraged, progressive activists to believe otherwise.

It’s probably worth pointing out something else: much of the furor on the left is over the individual mandate — and that’s at least in part a legacy from the Democratic primary, when Obama campaigned against his rivals by attacking the fact that their plans contained such a mandate. It was obvious even then, if you actually did the economics, that whatever plan finally emerged would have to include a mandate. And so Obama was storing up trouble. Here’s what I wrote two years ago:

My main concern right now is with Mr. Obama’s rhetoric: by echoing the talking points of those who oppose any form of universal health care, he’s making the task of any future president who tries to deliver universal care considerably more difficult. I’d add, however, a further concern: the debate over mandates has reinforced the uncomfortable sense among some health reformers that Mr. Obama just isn’t that serious about achieving universal care — that he introduced a plan because he had to, but that every time there’s a hard choice to be made he comes down on the side of doing less.

Sure enough, when it came to the reality of health care reform, a mandate turned out to be essential. And the future president haunted by the legacy of that anti-mandate demagoguery, it turns out, is Mr. Obama himself.

But what reformers should remember is that right now, none of this matters. So what if Obama isn’t who you thought he was? The fact is that the dream is coming true — not quite as you imagined or hoped it would be, but nonetheless the Senate is about to pass a bill that, for all its flaws, is the biggest piece of progressive legislation since Medicare.