President Barack Obama, by inclination and experience, has always been half intellectual law-school lecturer, half street-smart community organizer. In the long march toward passage of a historic health-care bill, it was the intellectual who started the journey; it was the community organizer who finished it off.

That's as good a way as any to summarize how Mr. Obama handled the first major, and perhaps defining, issue of his presidency. In the long and tortuous year of unfolding debate, two very different presidents could...