“Obama Disassociates from Reality,” Peter Wehner notes at Commentary. Of course, that headline could summarize Mr. Obama’s entire adult life, but Wehner is specifically referring to the president’s Rose Garden infomercial yesterday, his attempt to salvage the reputation of his signature socialized medical insurance program:
About President Obama’s remarks on Monday in the Rose Garden on the matter of the problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act and, specifically, healthcare.gov, it seemed to me that they served a valuable purpose, at least to this extent: They distilled the Obama presidency to some of its core qualities: (a) detachment from reality; (b) misleading in its claims; (c) deeply polarizing and partisan; and (d) filled with lame excuses.
But there was another noteworthy element to what the president said. I have in mind the pitiable quality of his remarks. Speaking about the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama kept insisting–over and over and over again–how good the product is, how really and exceptionally good it is, how popular it is, and how things really and truly will work out.
Methinks he doth trieth too hard. The president spoke about ObamaCare as if it were a work of art, one or two brushstrokes away from being a masterpiece. Which created the impression that the president is living in a make believe world.
I’d say Mr. Obama is one step removed from talking to the paintings in the White House, but that would assume that he believes that the former presidents would have anything meaningful to tell him. And speaking of ghosts of the the past, Wehner concludes:
There’s a reason reporters who cover the White House say that top aides and even the president are deeply unsettled. It’s not just that what he considers his legacy achievement looks to be imploding before our eyes, which would be bad enough. There’s something else going on as well.
The Affordable Care Act or close approximations of it is something liberals have worked toward for generations. It has been, for the left, a kind of talisman; to have had it codified in law ranks as one of the great liberal achievements in American history. Or so the left though. They probably should have been more careful in what they asked for. As Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker put it, “The ACA is the most important liberal project in decades. If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.”
Correct. And if you go to the scorecard, you’ll see that the ACA is failing. That the great and mighty Obama seems powerless to stop it. And that ObamaCare may become an ever more complete disaster for liberalism than it is now. Which is saying something.
Of course, it’s not just the inhabitants of the White House who are becoming unsettled — so are the more left-leaning reporters who cover it. Or as Erika Johnsen of Hot Air paraphrases a query NPR’s Mara Liasson asks former Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman turned Obama spokesman Jay Carney, “Will we be getting daily updates on ObamaCare, like during natural disasters?”
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