The sudden resurgence of liberal optimism about Obamacare — the subject of my Sunday column — has included some “I told you so’s” directed at those members of the D.C. media inner ring who declared Obama’s presidency potentially finished, ruined, kaput, during the recent cascade of bad news and polls. Over at The New Republic, Alec MacGillis weaves two other potentially Obama-friendly developments (the decent jobs numbers, and the quasi-deal with Iran) into an argument that doomsaying is simply ridiculous on its face:

… this has been an especially inglorious stretch for Beltway hyperventilators. First came the government shutdown and the ensuing declamations about the crack-up of the Republican Party. Then, with whiplash force, came the obituaries for the Obama presidency. The Washington press corps has been reduced to the state of the tennis-watching kittens in this video, with the generic congressional ballot surveys playing the part of the ball flitting back and forth. What explains for this even-worse-than-usual excitability? Much of it has to do with the age-old who’s-up-who’s down, permanent-campaign tendencies of the political media, exacerbated by a profusion of polling, daily tipsheets and Twitter. Overlaid on this is our obsession with the presidency, which leads us both to inflate the aura of the office and to view periods of tribulation as some sort of existential collapse. Add in the tendencies of even more serious reporters to get into a chew-toy mode with tales of scandal or policy dysfunction, as happened with the healthcare.gov debacle – the media has been so busy hyping every last aspect of the rollout’s woes that it did indeed start to seem inconceivable that things might get better soon. But things did get better, as one should have been able to anticipate, given the resources and pressure that were belatedly brought to bear on the challenge. The fiasco took a real toll on the law and on the liberal project, for which Barack Obama bears real responsibility. But the end of a presidency? Take a deep breath, folks.

Deep breaths are always recommended, but let me say a word in defense of the doomsayers. Obviously no modern presidency is “finished” so long as its occupant retains the use of his faculties and the command of speech: The office has too much power to be simply politically sidelined, a range of tools for exercising that power (especially in foreign policy, but through the federal bureaucracy as well) survive even when Congress is entirely uncooperative, and new crises that demand an executive response can re-empower even the most unpopular president. Obama’s struggles have inspired comparisons to George W. Bush’s second term, and invocations of Hurricane Katrina and Iraq. But of course all kinds of consequential choices were made in the Bush White House after his approval rating reached the flirting-with-dismal level where Obama’s numbers are today — with the Alito confirmation, the Iraqi “surge,” and TARP probably looming largest, and lesser examples abounding as well.

But contra MacGillis, I think most of the writers making the Obama-Bush comparisons understand that point, and they would presumably say, “okay, yes, Bush retained the powers of the presidency, but somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 thumping he passed over a crucial threshold where 1) he no longer had a hope in Hades of moving big-ticket legislation through Congress and 2) he no longer had a plausible path to recovering the public’s trust.” That’s what Washington scribes tend to mean when they apply the shorthand term “finished” to a presidency, and it seems perfectly reasonable to look at a chief executive in Obama’s position — his second-term numbers mirroring Bush rather than Reagan or Clinton, his base eroding, his party’s odds of losing the Senate rising, his defenders beginning to talk about long-term policy vindication more than short-term political success — and ask whether he’s reached that point as well.

I’m not sure he has; I think we’ll have a better sense of the Obamacare rollout’s imprint on his second term in February than we do today. But I do think that such points of no return (or no return absent a hostage crisis) exist for elected officials, regardless of the powers they retain, and trying to discern those inflection points and their implications (for 2014 and immigration reform, in this case, among other issues) is part of the pundit’s job description.

Perhaps the doomsayers are wrong this time, but they have a recently-accelerating, year-long trend and plausible forecasts of further trouble to come to back their instinct. MacGillis, meanwhile, is countering with just a week’s worth of better news — some of which might not actually be all that great, and some of which is extremely difficult to assess. So while their case is not yet proven, his alleged refutation is nothing of the sort.