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The Lesson of Monday: Obama Doesn’t Know What to Do Yet, So He’s Spinning | by Jim Geraghty
October 22, 2013
The Lesson of Monday: Obama Doesn’t Know What to Do Yet, So He’s Spinning
President Obama’s performance at Monday’s pep rally for Obamacare was strikingly tone-deaf. The White House spin preceding the event promised a little bit of mea culpa, maybe even a flash of anger at the folks who had primary responsibility for ensuring the Obamacare exchange websites functioned as promised. (We all know that buck stops long before it arrives at the Oval Office.)
Nicole Fisher, Forbes: “Unfortunately for those Americans who are really interested in signing up on the exchange sites, he glossed over the depth and breadth of the current troubles, giving a speech that sounded more like a State of the Union address with small-business examples and reading letters written to the White House.”
The editors of USA Today are unimpressed:
You can’t help but wonder: Where was all this frantic effort in the three-and-a-half years from the time Obama signed the health law to the day the exchanges opened on Oct. 1? Because that might have helped avoid the unforced error that is raising doubts about the administration’s ability to manage other pieces of the complex law…
Denial and evasion haven’t worked, so the administration seems finally to be trying a smidgeon of candor. The person most visibly in charge of the mess, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, told The Wall Street Journal last week that the system needed five years of construction and a year of testing, but instead got “two years and almost no testing.”
Really? There were no such warnings in advance, suggesting she wasn’t on top of the situation.
On Monday, Obama argued that the dysfunctional websites are the equivalent of broken cash registers in a store filled with appealing goods. Once they’re fixed, shoppers will be happy.
So far, there’s no way to know whether he’s right because the administration remains mostly clammed up. It won’t say how many people have enrolled. It won’t fully detail the problems. And it hasn’t identified key subcontractors who botched the $400 million start-up, or the team brought in for repairs.
Of course they’re going to clam up. This is an administration that got the entire national-security team to go along with blaming a terror attack on September 11, 2012, on a YouTube video for a couple of days. They’ve more or less managed to wait out the IRS scandal, the NSA scandal, Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice targeting AP reporters and James Rosen, Attorney General Eric Holder’s potential perjury, James Clapper’s potential perjury, and every other scandal that’s come down the pike.
Obama has never encountered a problem he couldn’t spin or distract his way out of: Jeremiah Wright, the crappy data on stimulus.gov (bit of foreshadowing, huh?), the runaway spending of the General Services Administration’s luxurious conferences, Solyndra, Lisa Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” secret identity…
Obama’s never had to say, “my team and I screwed up, and I’m sorry.”
When Obama didn’t downplay, problems, he ignored them. “For the vast majority of Americans — for 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance through your employer or Medicare or Medicaid — you don’t need to sign up for coverage through a website at all. You’ve already got coverage. What the Affordable Care Act does for you is to provide you with new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time. You may not know it, but you’re already benefiting from these provisions in the law.”
Absolutely no acknowledgement of developments like this: “Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies… Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people — about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.”
The twin promises, “If you like your plan you can keep your plan; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” were key to passing this monstrosity. If Obama had said, “some of you will be forced to give up your current plan and your current doctor,” this thing never would have gotten 200 votes in the House.
But there’s nothing Obama can say on that without admitting he made a promise he couldn’t keep. (“It reached its expiration date.” — the 2009 version of me.) So he’s just going to try to wait it out, and hope that the new tech guys can work a miracle.
No, Really, Why Isn’t Obama Angrier at Kathleen Sebelius?
Let’s do a little thought experiment.
Congratulations! You’re a Republican, and you were elected president of the United States in November 2016. You ran on entitlement reform, and you appear to have won a mandate to reform Social Security by creating a 401(k)-style individual retirement account for every American worker and allowing Americans to divert part of their payroll taxes into those accounts. If it works well, millions of Americans will have secure retirements, reducing dependency on a Social Security system and helping them to enjoy prosperity well into their golden years while leaving a little something for their kids.
This is still a controversial policy, of course. Some Democrats don’t like it because they think individual retirement accounts are too risky for Americans’ savings. Some fear turning every American into an investor will impede their demonization of big business. Some just oppose it because they hate you and everything you stand for. And a lot of Americans are worried that they could make the wrong investments and lose money.
You spend enormous political capital getting your plan passed, and defend it at the Supreme Court. You appoint a governor of your own party to be the administrator of the Social Security Administration, overseeing the transition to individual accounts — Karl Schmebelius. You spend a great deal of time touting a website that will help Americans track how their individual funds – using part of the money that they would normally pay into Social Security — are doing and how close they are to their goal for retirement savings.
And then upon its debut, the website crashes and malfunctions as badly as we’ve seen with the Obamacare exchanges. Even though you’ve been getting regular updates, and had heard about “glitches,” you’re blindsided by the complete failure of the system. Three weeks into the program, your appointee Karl Schmebelius tells the Wall Street Journal he needed another four years to do the job properly.
Would you keep Schmebelius, or would you fire him instantly for embarrassing you, your administration, and putting your legacy in jeopardy? Wouldn’t you be furious? Wouldn’t you want the American people to know you were furious?
At the very least, you would hold a press conference and bring out legendary furious and abusive British chef Gordon Ramsey to berate the bejesus out of Schmebelius, wouldn’t you?
Syria, Now Out of the Headlines Again, Every Bit the Hellhole It Was Before
Hey, remember Syria?
About a month ago, Bashir Assad’s regime in Syria was the biggest issue before the president. John Kerry said Assad now ranked alongside Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. The president addressed the country in prime time. And then…
Putin came in with a deal and then everybody seemed to forget about it — which is probably what President Obama preferred, anyway.
On Monday, the editorial board of the Washington Post noticed that the United States has, for all extents and purposes, lost the conflict:
The regime did manage to trade an arsenal that had outlived its original purpose for the cancellation of a U.S. military onslaught that might have tipped the balance in the civil war. That deal prompted further divisions in the U.S.-backed opposition and triggered a number of rebel groups to switch allegiance to an Islamist front. The Geneva meeting is looking doubtful, in part because U.S. diplomats are unable to explain how it could lead to Mr. Assad’s departure. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s Mr. Assad rather than Mr. Obama who wants to talk about this. For the United States, it’s a bleak and shameful picture.
So the opposition is now using al-Qaeda’s tactics more frequently:
A suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with propane tanks at a crowded military checkpoint in central Syria on Sunday, killing more than 30 people, most of them civilians, in the second such attack by fighters linked to Al Qaeda in two days.
The humanitarian crisis is getting even worse:
Experts are concerned that polio may have made a return to war-torn Syria.
The World Health Organization says it has received reports of the first suspected outbreak in the country in 14 years.
Syrian’s Ministry of Public Health is launching an urgent response, but experts fear the disease will be hard to control amid civil unrest.
Immunisation is almost impossible to carry out in regions under intense shellfire.
But at least Assad is working with us and the Russians on the peace summit, right? Eh, no. Quite defiant of the whole process.
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad dealt a blow to a US-Russian initiative for a peace conference, in an interview aired Monday, saying the factors were not in place for it to be successful.
“No time has been set, and the factors are not yet in place if we want (the initiative dubbed Geneva 2) to succeed,” Assad told Lebanese television channel Al-Mayadeen.
“Which forces are taking part? What relation do these forces have with the Syrian people? Do these forces represent the Syrian people, or do they represent the states that invented them?” Assad asked in typically defiant fashion.
In the lengthy interview, Assad also said he was willing to run for re-election in 2014, in remarks that came soon after US Secretary of State John Kerry said that if he were to win, it would extend Syria’s civil war.
And the war wages on, with more civilian casualties:
Residents of a Syrian town besieged by President Assad’s forces appealed to the world to “save us from death” in an open letter describing desperate conditions and suffering.
Hundreds of men, women and children in Mouadamiya have died and thousands have been wounded, they said.
Mouadamiya, on the southwest outskirts of the capital Damascus, was occupied by anti-Assad rebels last year and the government has been trying to win it back since then.
The SNC said nearly 12,000 people face starvation and death in Mouadamiya. About 90 percent of Mouadamiya has been destroyed, few doctors remained, and residents were eating “leaves of trees.”
The death toll is now past 115,000 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights; “The figure suggested that around 5,000 people had died in September alone and that the bloodshed has not been slowed by an international deal for the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons after an August 21 sarin gas attack in the Damascus area.”
Amazing how developments in Syria go from a page A16 story, to page one, and then back to page A16 again.
Come See Us in Boston!
It will not surprise you that I am really looking forward to this:
It’s a fundraiser, so it will cost to get in.
The good news is, NRO set up a brand new website to help you purchase tickets to the event, with gold, silver, and bronze levels of access and a complicated formula to provide subsidies for people based on income. In fact, let’s load it up right here…
“Hi, remember me?”
Ah, dang it.
Best to sign up here, then.
ADDENDUM: Rex Harrison’s hat, a contributor at Ace of Spades, creates a remarkably accurate mock-up of the Obamacare exchange site. It works best when you click on “Apply.”
To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
Filed under: Miscellaneuos News 
Source: http://jericho777.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/the-lesson-of-monday-obama-doesnt-know-what-to-do-yet-so-hes-spinning-by-jim-geraghty/
