When Obama took office in 2009, he also made health overhaul a priority. But having watched Clinton’s failure 16 years earlier, he and his advisers, many of whom were Clinton White House veterans, opted for a far more hands-off approach. “The administration has been careful not to weigh in with too much authority or to make any public pronouncements on the negotiations,” Matt Bai wrote in June 2009.

Obama took lots of flak for that choice. “Among the many problems President Barack Obama confronts on the health-care front, one is fairly simple. He is defending a plan that doesn’t really exist,” Seib wrote that September. A week later, Obama himself admitted overcorrecting. “I, out of an effort to give Congress the ability to do this thing and not step on their toes, probably left too much ambiguity out there, which then allowed opponents of reform to come in and fill up the airwaves with a lot of nonsense,” he told Good Morning America. Months later, after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts deprived Democrats of a Senate supermajority, Christina Bellantoni wrote that Obama had “all but disappeared from the discussions as congressional leaders attempt to figure out a way to finalize a health-care plan now that they have just 59 Senate seats.”

Obama got his law in the end, but it was a deeply flawed one. It was far enough left to create a conservative bogeyman, while failing to really achieve many progressive priorities; the jury-rigged structure was open to challenges in the courts, which, for example, reduced Medicaid expansion to an optional program in states. The law was deeply unpopular, right up until the moment Trump tried to repeal it.

For the attempt to repeal Obamacare, Trump adopted the Obama strategy. He basically took a very hands-off approach, while laying out a few basic principles he wished to see included. It was only late in the process that Trump intervened personally, inviting lawmakers to the White House for a last-minute persuasion session meant to showcase his prowess as a dealmaker. (It was a sign of just how hands-off he’d been that during that meeting, he felt the necessity to declare that he was 100 percent in support of the House health plan.) But it failed—Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t get enough votes to pass the bill, and he was forced to pull it.

There were, of course, some significant differences in Obama’s and Trump’s approaches, the distant handling aside. For one, the principles that Trump suggested—such as keeping in place the popular provisions of Obamacare and guaranteeing equal or broader coverage—were essentially impossible for a Republican House to pass. For another, he tried to get it done in two months, with an understaffed, inexperienced White House. Obama, by contrast, had a huge team of veteran Hill figures working for him, waited 14 months into office for a bill to pass, and still nearly failed. (The failed Clinton plan took months of work, too.)