ObamaCare isn’t the only massive failure that has been foisted on the nation by this Regime. America is currently being hobbled by a litany of federal government debacles. It’s gotten to the point that it’s hard not to conclude that government malfeasance – gross mismanagement, waste, fraud and abuse – is a feature of this administration, not a bug:
There is Benghazi, Libya. Fast and Furious. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) abuse of conservative and Tea Party groups. The National Security Administration (NSA) spying on just about everyone on the planet.And oh so many more….
But it’s the ongoing trainwreck of ObamaCare that has crest-fallen liberals across the land wondering aloud, how on earth this supposedly super-smart, ultra-competent POTUS messed up so badly.
Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest writes that the most shocking Obamacare revelation came during Obama’s “hasty and awkward” press conference, last week when he responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:
OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.
This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.
Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.
Well, an explanation has emerged via Gloria Borger to explain what happened: “No drama Obama.”
It’s a real head-scratcher. Most powerful man in the free world. Most important issue. Most politically explosive, particularly coming on the heels of the government shutdown. Consider the context: Republicans had just tried to defund Obamacare, and they lost in a heap of public humiliation. So the rollout of Obamacare had to be really impressive, because the Republicans had to be proven wrong.
And yet, as the dry-runs continued to produce red flags–over and over–the president remained in his steely cocoon. If this were the presidency of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, the obvious theories would abound: the chief executive is disengaged. Or incurious. Or worse. But since Obama is none of the above, what gives?
This much is clear, after speaking with both past and present senior administration officials: no one was really in charge, so no one knew for sure how bad the overall picture was. What’s more, and–perhaps most telling–no one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer. “Part of it is the no-drama culture.”
Oh, that. The infamous no-drama Obama credo: no panic, no drama. “No drama is attractive to people, except there are times when people actually should light their hair on fire,” says one former senior administration official. “That would have been a very good thing.”
“People don’t like to tell him bad news” + “No drama Obama” = Plausible deniability and No accountability.
That’s how the smartest and most competent president in American history likes to roll.
And hey – good news for progressives!: According to the latest email to his OFA political foot soldiers, there’s a lot left to do on his to-do list.
Rather than do something to correct the failures of his “already done” list, it’s Forward ho! for No Drama Obama.
*Shudder*