I think that this CNN op-ed by David Gergen illustrates just how damaging the clumsy debut of the PPACA’s portal was to the Obama Administration:
(CNN) — Someone in the Obama White House clearly has a good book to write one day: “How Not to Do Rollouts.”
With one hapless episode after another, the rollout of the President’s plan to destroy ISIS is beginning to rival the less-than-splendid debut of the Obamacare website.
President Barack Obama’s critics may take some glee from the recent missteps, but they shouldn’t. Going to war is serious business, especially when the conflict promises to be long and messy.
For the nation’s sake, our dysfunctional politics needs to become functional on this one or we put too much at risk, starting with the lives of our men and women in uniform.
That’s why it is imperative and urgent that the Obama team and their allies take a deep breath, pull themselves together and get this war effort on solid footing. Instead of becoming defensive, they need to go on offense, showing the world they are firmly in charge and on a winning path.
Just to clear the fog from Mr. Gergen’s understanding, the purpose of the White House’s policy in Iraq is “showing the world they are firmly in charge” rather than “on a winning path”.
That having been said, I find that a pretty fair illustration of the damage that the Obama Administration did to itself last year when it insisted that Healthcare.gov be opened for business on schedule rather than when it was ready. I’m sure they had their reasons but I suspect they’re finding that it casts a pall over every action they take or will take.
I also predict that its legend will grow and it will increasingly be portrayed as much worse than it actually was, hard as that may be to imagine. It will become a symbol of overreaching, under-accomplishing federal government programs of every stripe for the foreseeable future.
Could be, but here we a re a year later and the program is almost exactly where it was predicted it would be if the rollout had gone well.
Steve
I’m sure Oliver Stone will have a film that shows exactly how Jack Ruby sneaked in to sabotage Obamacare. (Hint: GW helped him crack the computer network at HHS.)
My way of thinking, Mr. Obama showed he was not a very good top level IT manager. Other hand, 60 years of data processing industry experience shows that most top level IT managers are no good. There wasn’t anything surprising about the failure in Obamacare’s roll out, in other words.
Unless you want to think that someone as high up as the President of the United States and his staff ought to have paid more attention to what was going on in the trenches — that failure was disappointing.