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Remember how that fight over the budget was all about Obamacare?

Seems like ancient history now, but House Republicans ostensibly shut down the government 17 days ago, demanding first a defunding, and, when that failed, a year's delay in the health law.

When it became clear that President Obama and Senate Democrats weren't going to yield to demands to stop or slow implementation of the administration's signature legislative achievement, Republicans looked for smaller changes.

They floated the idea of killing or delaying an unpopular tax on medical devices. Many Senate Democrats joined Republicans in a nonbinding vote of displeasure on the tax earlier this year.

The Republicans also looked to take away health insurance contributions for congressional and executive branch staffers. And they proposed to delay a temporary $63 annual per-person health insurance tax intended to build a fund to help pay for high-cost cases.

None of those things ended up in the final bill that reopened the federal government and raised the debt ceiling Wednesday night.

So what did?

Well, there was a little language related to the health law. It requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services "certify to the Congress that the Exchanges verify" that individuals who get subsidies for premiums and cost-sharing are, in fact, eligible. And that the secretary "shall submit a report to the Congress that details the procedures employed by the American Health Benefit Exchanges to verify eligibility for credit and cost-sharing."

Sounds like a big deal? Not really. It so happens that the much-maligned "data hub" that's part of the health exchange already links to the IRS to verify income eligibility. So, basically, the law requires HHS Secretary Sebelius to write a letter explaining what the department is already doing.

But it's not just that the Republicans failed to make any changes to the health law in their 16-day tirade against the government. News coverage of the shutdown and potential default crowded out stories about the very rocky rollout of the health exchanges themselves.

As The Washington Post's Ezra Klein tweeted Wednesday:

Hearing from more people getting through http://t.co/iJrBCjFhBY. Ironic if GOP knocked it from headlines just long enough for it to be fixed

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 16, 2013

With the double crises of a partial government shutdown and a potential debt default resolved, it's a good time to consider some of the lessons we learned from the dysfunction and drama of recent weeks.

Here are 10 of them:

Shutting Down The Government Is Not A Winning Political Strategy

Once again, the GOP brand was hurt because of a failure to learn from past mistakes. Republicans were warned before this shutdown that it could seriously hurt the party's approval ratings, as in 1996 during the last shutdown showdown. Many Republicans convinced themselves that this time was different. It wasn't. Most Americans like government more than they let on.

Obama Wasn't Bluffing

This time the president meant it when he said he wasn't going to let Republicans use government shutdowns or potential debt defaults to pressure him into making policy changes. Obama had actually signaled his shift long before the current fight. But his message either wasn't heard clearly by enough of the right people or they expected him to blink first.

The House GOP Is Ungovernable

The wheels have truly come off the House Republican Conference. The GOP-controlled House was already one of the least productive in recent history largely because of Speaker John Boehner's difficulty in getting a majority of votes on controversial legislation from his fractured group. The two-week shutdown just furthers the perception of a caucus in disarray and raises real questions about how the House will be able to move major legislation like an immigration overhaul or budget bills.

Boehner's Speakership Rises And Falls

A corollary to House Republicans being adrift is the state of Boehner's speakership. It's a tale of two Boehners, actually. Inside his conference, Boehner strengthened his hand by allowing its Tea Party faction to drive the House GOP strategy. Those Tea Party members have praised Boehner for his handling of the shutdown-debt ceiling fight, making a challenge to his speakership unlikely. But Boehner's hand is weaker outside his conference, compared with Obama and Reid, which could have real consequences in negotiations with Democrats. And with voter approval of congressional Republicans bumping the bottom, it will be hard for him to argue that Republican positions widely reflect Americans' wishes.

The Hastert Rule Really Isn't One

It took the current crisis for Republican Dennis Hastert, the former House speaker, to say it was just common sense, not an actual rule. As speaker, you want a majority of your party to support the legislation you bring to the House floor. But if it takes votes from the other party to pass important bills, so be it. Boehner and Hastert don't talk, so Hastert couldn't apparently tell Boehner this directly.

The Senate Emerges Enhanced

Well, at least in contrast to a weaker House. By once again arriving at a deal to avert financial disaster after an abysmal House failure, as it has done several times now, the Senate is clearly the more functional of the two chambers. Of course, that's a relative term.

Sen. Mitch McConnell Isn't Panicking

Cutting a deal to end the impasse with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? Maybe the Kentucky senator and minority leader isn't as frightened by his Tea Party-backed primary challenger, Matt Bevin, as people think. McConnell's last minute efforts toward compromise suggest McConnell could be looking past Bevin and towards the general election contest with Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Kentucky secretary of state who's raising lots of money and polling competitively against him.

Sen. Ted Cruz Is Running For President In 2016

The Texas senator would be a strong contender for the Tea Party presidential nomination if there were one. But as the leading proponent of the strategy of shutting down the government in an effort to gut the Affordable Care Act, he's reduced his general election appeal. Indeed, the Houston Chronicle which endorsed him for Senate has now has buyer's remorse.

The Hardliners May Have Gone Too Far

Even some conservative Republicans have had just about enough of the hardline Tea Party members. And they're speaking out. Consider Rep. Charles Boustamy. R-La., who told National Journal that Tea Party lawmakers' "allegiance is not to the members in the conference. Their allegiance is not to the leadership team and to conservative values. Their allegiance is to these outside Washington DC interest groups that raise money and go after conservative Republicans."

How To Blow A Golden Political Opportunity

The irony of the fiscal fight is that the story of the terribly botched Affordable Care Act rollout has been buried by the shutdown and debt ceiling news. The lesson? If you want to lift the curtain on a monumentally glitchy major project like the enrollment process for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, you'd be wise to wait until the nation is wildly distracted by a government shutdown and potential debt default.

We can wonder how BBC America's Burton And Taylor might have been received in the absence of Lifetime's Liz And Dick, which, almost a year ago, did not quite rehabilitate Lindsay Lohan's career in the way she was hoping. Perhaps we'd have been able to see this biopic, with Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter, purely as its own project.

But it's very difficult not to be conked in the head over and over again by the sheer number of things Burton And Taylor, which is still essentially a celebrity meltdown biopic, gets right that Liz And Dick got wrong. It's not a surprise in the great majority of cases, given who's involved, but it's conspicuous nevertheless.

Unsurprisingly, the portrayal of Taylor is the biggest one of all. Bonham Carter has a firm hand on a fundamental conflict within Taylor, which is that she seems like such an impossibly elegant, self-possessed woman at some moments and like such an infuriating flake at others. The styling is not as amped-up as Lohan's was; it's not quite as glamorous. But Bonham Carter's breathy, chirpy Taylor voice recalls the woman eerily at times.

It's safe to say Dominic West also makes a substantially more persuasive serious British stage actor than Grant Bowler did. The film is more sympathetic to Burton than to Taylor in many ways, and West gives him a certain weary attachment to her — more the attachment of an addict than a lover.

Burton And Taylor also benefits from the decision to focus on a particular period of time; namely, the Broadway production of Noel Coward's Private Lives in which the two co-starred in 1983, several years after their second divorce. While the Lifetime film seemed like a highlight reel of iconic moments, this one can sit with some actual story elements, like Burton's erratic attempts to quit drinking and his far more serious attempts to get Taylor off of pills (a few months prior to her first trip to the Betty Ford Center, and not terribly long before he died), long enough for them to have some heft.

It's not necessarily great, but it affords them and their relationship some complexity (and toxicity) and nuance. And the performances from the two leads, perhaps appropriately, are terrific.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin is a book read in an afternoon, and remembered long after. Mary, mother of a murdered son, struggles to mourn in the presence of a menacing character recognizable as the writer of the Gospel of John. As her watcher questions and cajoles, demanding a version of events that Mary cannot endorse, Toibin shows us how history is made, in the determined shaping and reshaping of stories. Bold, intense and exquisitely crafted, this iconoclastic imagining is a power pack of a book that, at only 81 pages, presents a daring interpretation of what a novel can be.

Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being plays with ideas of perception and interconnectedness from the title page onward. Her eponymous narrator, who lives on a remote Canadian island, finds a plastic bag washed up on the beach. In it is a Hello Kitty box containing the diary of Nao, a girl struggling toward womanhood in modern-day Japan. Ruth's own writing has stalled, and as she immerses herself in Nao's story, and that of the girl's 104-year-old Zen Buddhist grandmother, Ozeki braids together the lives of the three women. It's an intricate pattern of cause and effect, skillfully batting the stories of Ruth and Nao back and forth until the reader feels she has entered a conversation across space and time, unraveling some of the mysteries of existence along the way.

Cause and effect are also at the core of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, a tale of two brothers set in Kolkata and Rhode Island. One, Subhash, leaves home for a new life in America; the other, Udayan, stays behind, deeply involved in the politics of his country. Udayan's radical affiliations lead to his brutal execution by security forces. While perhaps the most conventional title on the shortlist in terms of form, Lahiri's work is a measured and thoughtful meditation on home, family and the enduring effects of personal choice.

In a shortlist of memorable titles, this year's winner, The Luminaries, by Canadian-born New Zealander Eleanor Catton, is a masterwork of structural brilliance. Set in the gold fields of New Zealand in 1866, the book tells the stories of 20 characters, all of whom are implicated in an untimely death, a suspected suicide, a disappearance and a stolen fortune. While there is a compelling narrative — a mystery to be solved — there are also archetypal characters rendered alive with dialogue, and a plot that seduces the reader with revelations and reversals at every turn.

If the shortlist this year has offered up new ways to appreciate how a story may be told, Catton's win celebrates a writer whose powers of innovation are deeply rooted in an understanding of what it takes to hold a reader in her grip for 800-plus pages, never losing their attention.

Ellah Allfrey is an editor and critic. She lives in London.