Obama carried a lot of baggage being the 1st black President. I'm sure he feared, and rightfully so - since history proved it happened anyway, that if he allowed himself to be labeled as too 'radical' it would be an end to the chance of another black man being elected. He picked what he thought was the single most important thing he could do and put all his political capital into it.
Yeah - if he had been more experienced he might have been more effective, and you can always look back in hindsight and see other options his admin missed, but I'm not going to slam him for doing the lift that he did, which was one no-one else had achieved in 50 yrs.