Although I think that much of the analysis in this article at The Economist, on the president’s dwindling approval rating following the feeble debut of Healthcare.gov and the various NSA revelations, is quite correct, I think the slug, “Barack Obama’s supporters are worried that he is a terrible manager”. When you look at the evidence more closely, there’s very little to support the claim. Not that he’s a terrible manager. At this point that’s pretty obvious. I mean that his supporters are worried.

Consider this observation from Charlie Cook at The National Journal:

For the week of Oct. 21 to Oct. 27, Gallup polling found that Obama’s job approval was 80 percent among Democrats, just a touch above his September average of 79 percent; among Republicans, it was 10 percent, somewhat lower than the 12 percent in September. Among liberals, Obama’s approval rating was 74 percent, slightly above his 71 percent for September; among conservatives, it was 22 percent, just below the 23 percent last month. None of these numbers are particularly remarkable.

It’s always more interesting to watch the numbers among independents and moderates, because their views are much less anchored in partisanship or ideology. Among independents, Obama’s job-approval rating was 36 percent, about the same as the 37 percent for September; among moderates, it was 47 percent, a little bit below the 50 percent for September. While it would certainly be reasonable to expect Obama’s numbers to dip a little among partisans and ideologues in reaction to recent events, those numbers aren’t likely to move as much as those from the independents and moderates.

In other words the president’s supporters are holding firm but most of the country are either opponents (Republicans) or their approval is contingent upon performance. It’s among these latter two groups that the president’s approval is declining.

In comments over at OTB there was a remark to the effect that American politics isn’t à la carte but table d’hôte. You must take the policies of each party in their entirety. I think that’s almost completely wrong.

Some Americans are solid partisans. They’ll continue to support the elected officials of their own party regardless of what they say or do. However, for a plurality of Americans support is contingent on performance. They’ll support elected officials only within certain bounds. Execution matters. Policies matter.

You might want to take a look this table from the World Bank on personal out-of-pocket expenditures on healthcare as a percentage of private expenditure on healthcare. It’s something to keep in mind the next time somebody touts somebody else’s healthcare system. One of the many ways in which our system is different.

IMO there are several different ways of looking at this table. One way would be that we, personally, are paying too little for healthcare. Another would be that public expenditure is a lot higher elsewhere. That table is here by the way.

There’s a fun article over at, of all places, the Wall Street Journal on Linda Ronstadt and the recording of her first monster hit, Different Drum. It’s been characterized as the first “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup song. The version on the record was done without rehearsal, with musicians with whom she’d never worked, without the words in front of her, and, since she couldn’t read music, without even a lead sheet.

Be sure to listen to the song’s composer, Mike Nesmith’s rendition of the song. You might remember him as the member of The Monkees who wore the stocking cap. They also included the first recorded version of the song by the Greenbriar Boys, the album version, and a later performance by Ms. Ronstadt.

I’ve written about the sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) problem being encountered on Toyota, VW, and other makes of automobiles before. Toyota has reached a settlement with one of the plaintiffs suing them over the matter:

OKLAHOMA CITY — Toyota Motor Corp. on Friday reached a settlement with the victims of a deadly 2007 car crash, a day after an Oklahoma Country jury became the first in the country to find the company liable in a case of sudden unintended acceleration.

On Thursday, the jury awarded a total of $3 million in monetary damages to the injured driver of the 2005 Camry involved in the crash, and to the family of the passenger, who was killed.

The ruling was significant because it was the first case where plaintiffs argued that a car’s electronics — in this case the software connected to the Camry’s electronic throttle-control system — caused the unintended acceleration. The Japanese automaker recalled millions of cars, starting in 2009, following claims of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles. It has denied that electronics played any role in the problem.

I’ve long suspected that the problem was real and it was either a software problem or a problem caused by some combination of the vehicles’ computer hardware and its software (which is another type of software problem). Here’s an interesting, if tech-y, analysis that finds that the problem is caused by “misbehaviors” of Toyota’s electronic throttle control system. They report a host of bad hardware and software design issues.

There are quite literally millions of vehicles that might potentially be subject to this problem and also quite literally billions in potential damages. The stakes are pretty darned high for Toyota and, unsurprisingly, their first line of defense was denial while the second was blame the users. I have 100% confidence that some proportion of the instances of SUA were not caused by driver error.

There are all sorts of reasons that problems of this magnitude can creep in. Designers can get away with it—the users can always be blamed. Management sometimes won’t pay to have things done right. It might even be true that they don’t have and for cultural reasons won’t hire people who are capable of doing things right. Hardware engineers are notoriously bad software developers.

This whole subject relates to the problems being encountered with Healthcare.gov. It ain’t just the public sector who fall in their faces with important software development projects. The private sector can flop, too. They just do it privately.

IMO it’s terribly difficult to implement massive software developments, particularly when they’re being second-guessed by politicians. An honest team could say “No problem. We can do it in ten years and it’ll cost $10 billion”. They’d be laughed out of the room. Instead, they say they can do it in six months for a tiny fraction of that cost. It’ll still take ten years and cost the same amount but then we’ll be committed.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

Massive Oil Discovery Puts Outback Town on World Energy Map

Some are crowing that the discovery will render Saudi Arabia unimportant.

James Joyner has written a post on the occasion of President Obama’s reaching the lowest approval rating of his presidency in the most recent polls:

A majority of Americans now disapprove of President Obama’s performance and a whopping 70 percent think the country is moving in the wrong direction.

For a longer term view of the president’s approval see here. What follows is a longish comment I left on that post.

More important than the single lowest point is that the president’s approval numbers have been going in the wrong way since the end of last year. That’s the longest such period since the post-honeymoon decline at the beginning of his presidency.

Among post-war presidents his approval rating is only better than Johnson’s, Nixon’s and Geoge W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency. That’s not an enviable company. It’s .6% better than George W. Bush’s and .5% worse than Harry Truman’s. He’s not in impeachment territory but he’s not in “advancing his agenda” territory, either.

The parties of presidents with that low an approval rating in the 19th quarter of their presidencies do not tend to do well in the midterm elections of the next year. In every single case in the post-war period (including Truman) with the president’s approval that low the president’s party has lost seats both in the House and the Senate.

House districts are now more, shall we say, sorted than they were in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s so I wouldn’t expect big turnovers there. The much larger question is what is the president’s approval rating in states that have Senate elections in 2014? That’s where the real potential for trouble for the Democrats will be.

Barack Obama has triumphed over the odds before so it would be foolish to count him out now. Anyone who believes that the Democrats will take the House and hold the Senate is banking on his bucking the odds again. IMO it’s much more likely that the Republicans will increase their control of the House slightly and take the Senate with a very narrow majority.

Today Matt Miller squanders a perfectly good 800 word newspaper column with what can be summarized in a single sentence: people disagree about the PPACA. It’s in the form of an imaginary Crossfire program on the Social Security program, featuring Upton Sinclair, Frederick Hayek, Frances Perkins (FDR’s Secretary of Labor) and a Republican Congressman of whom I’ve never heard, Daniel Reed.

I strongly suspect that Mr. Miller didn’t bother looking up what Upton Sinclair actually wrote about Social Security. This is from the pamphlet he wrote when he was running for governor of California:

So far as concerns the EPIC system, let me add that when our workers on the land and in the factories are making comfort and plenty for themselves, we shall say to them: “It will be the part of wisdom for you to set aside a portion of your product, say 10% a year, to establish a fund for your care when you have reached old age, or in the event that you become ill or disabled. Being self-respecting Americans, you do not want to be dependent upon charity, whether of your relatives, or of the State, or of the Federal Government. You want to produce the wealth yourself, so that later on you can claim it as a right and enjoy it without humiliation.”

Clearly, times have changed. Similarly, Hayek does not appear to have opposed Social Security:

“In the Western world some provision for those threatened by the extremes of indigence or starvation due to circumstances beyond their control has long been accepted as a duty of the community.¹ The local arrangements which first supplied this need became inadequate when the growth of large cities and the increased mobility of men dissolved the old neighborhood ties, and (if the responsibility of the local authorities was not to produce obstacles to movement) these services had to be organized nationally and special agencies created to provide them.

and he applied for (and received) Social Security himself.

For Frances Perkins’s views on Social Security see here. I haven’t been able to locate a statement of Rep. Reed’s views but if this quote by Nicholas Kristof is accurate and representative he was against it.

However, let’s look at the actual question objectively. Is the PPACA more or less like Social Security? I believe it is not very similar to Social Security and, consequently, observations about similarities between the debates over Social Security and the debates about the PPACA are fatuous.

Consider:

1. The PPACA was enacted into law without a single Republican vote. Social Security secured solid majorities of both political parties.
2. The original Social Security Act of 1935 was under 70 pages long. The PPACA amounts to nearly 2,000 pages. The playwright and theatrical producer David Belasco once said “If you’ve got a clear idea, it can be put on the back of your business card.” The devisers of Social Security had a clear idea. Either the devisers of the PPACA did not or there’s a lot of extraneous stuff in it.
3. Social Security has been popular since its inception. The PPACA has never been supported by a majority of the people.
4. Most people expect to receive Social Security benefits. Most people do not expect to be insured under either the Medicaid expansion that’s part of the PPACA or the healthcare exchanges. I expect that the outside figure is about 5%.

The whole thing reminds me of Will Rogers’s famous wisecrack that the difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse when Congress is in session. When the Supreme Court found that the “individual mandate” of the PPACA was a tax, it reminded me of that wisecrack.

Update

It was pointed out in comments that as originally written Social Security covered far fewer than it does now. I also thought of some other differences:

• Social Security checks go directly to individuals. Under the PPACA checks either go to providers or to insurance carriers or underwriters.
• Social Security has inherent limits on the amount of payouts. There are no comparable limits on insurance payouts which means there’s no inherent cap on the cost of ObamaCare.

It was also pointed out that under the PPACA ex-pats would be required to pay without any possibility of receiving benefits. I don’t honestly know how accurate that is.

Here’s the best sentence I’ve read so far today. It’s from a piece by Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal on the press coverage of the PPACA:

The press stinks at covering abstractions, which the health-care debate was until a law was enacted and put into effect.

I think that Megan McArdle is wrong in at least one particular in her post on the disconnect between what the White House was saying and what Healthcare.gov’s developers apparently thought:

The yawning gap between what the IT people knew and what everyone else seems to have realized is staggering. Now, I’ve worked on some projects in which the business units seemed to have some sort of selective deafness that only materialized when we tried to tell them that they couldn’t have their magic fairy computer system that did everything they could imagine, only better, in the three months they wanted it to take, or for the paltry sum that they were willing to spend. And I learned the hard way not to assume that the business units, or even the chief information officer, had heard and understood what you said. That is how I became gifted in the art of writing CYA memos when I was directed to do the unwise or the impossible. So I do have some sympathy for the IT folks.

But I’ve never seen a gap this complete — one in which the entire IT organization seems to have been panicking about the impossibility of their task, and then the inevitable failures, while the folks issuing the orders were blithely issuing last-minute change orders and telling everyone they could find how swell this was all going to be. Usually, when things are going this wrong, you do more than casually mention it; you sit the folks on the business side down and explain that unless the project is pushed back, it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster.

Someone, somewhere pretty high up in the food chain must have understood that the website could not be ready on time and would not do what the political folks were promising. That person failed to communicate not only the unlikelihood of making the Oct. 1 start date, but also the extent of the problems that would follow if they opened anyway. The policy and political staffs genuinely seem to have been expecting a few weird errors and a little bit of downtime, not a computer system that failed at pretty much every step.

Quite to the contrary, I think it is absolutely possible that nobody in any of the developers’ organizations communicated to anyone in the White House just how bad things were. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. And you don’t get contracts worth in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars by saying “No”.

I think the developers just figured that they were on a cost-plus contract and if it wasn’t finished on October 1 it would be finished on November 1 or December 1 or some other time and the more time that elapsed the more they were likely to get paid to clean up the mess.