Just as every person has a finite amount of money in the bank, there is also such a thing as &quot;political capital&quot; and a politician must choose carefully how it is spent, because you cannot spend it well on many things. Obama used most of his political capital to overhaul healthcare, that was his top issue and it took years and years to do it. Now that it is more or less set in stone, he&#x27;s finally had the opportunity in the last couple years to look at other important items to him, namely climate change (for which he also did some important policy-making work), guns, immigration, and the prison system. It is not easy to make sweeping changes to any major policy, and even getting one big thing done in 8 years is hard to do in the current political climate.