Two Sebeliuses In One!

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 24 million people will get health insurance on the exchange by 2023, but only 7 million in the first year. Millions more can go into expanded Medicaid, although those projections were cut after the Supreme Court last year allowed states to opt out.

Sebelius on Monday said 7 million is a “realistic target.”

“We’re going to be driving our efforts toward that kind of enrollment effort,” she said. “It’s both about numbers and also hopefully getting a balanced risk pool.”

—“Kathleen Sebelius: Exchange enrollment goal is 7 million by end of March,” headline at de facto Obama house organ the Politico, June 24, 2013.

Another key member of the Obama administration is backing off of the goal of 7 million Obamacare enrollees. Last week, Joe Biden said “we may not get to” to the mark, but now Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius is saying it was never really taken seriously as a goal at all.

“First of all, 7 million was not [from] the administration,” she told HuffPost Live on Tuesday, saying it came from the Congressional Budget Office. “I’m not sure where they even got their numbers. Their numbers are all over the board.”

Sebelius said that she is “more interested in what we’re doing today” rather than previous estimates, and would continue to push to get more people signed up until the enrollment deadline at the end of March.

—”Sebelius: Actually, 7 Million Obamacare Enrollees Was Never Our Goal,” from Andrew Johnson at the NRO Corner, today.

In the early 1990s, back when he was Bill Clinton’s minister of propaganda before becoming, well, the Democrat party’s minister of propaganda at ABC, George Stephanopoulos was quoted as saying that the Clinton administration was “being held hostage by Lexus/Nexus.” And that was a few years before the Internet was on everyone’s desktop, which makes it easy, as Allahpundit does today at Hot Air, to round-up the following examples. (Click over to Hot Air to see the videos):

Three clips for you, in order: Today’s big lie; Sebelius telling NBC on September 30th of last year that seven million is the target; and then, just for fun, Jay Carney trying to spin his way out of this clusterfark last month. Note that September 30, 2013 was literally the eve of ObamaCare’s launch. Up until the very last minute, when she knew (or certainly should have known) that the website was a disaster in the making and would be hobbled for weeks or months, she passed on an easy opportunity to set expectations for enrollment much lower. Sheesh.

But does this administration even care about its past quotes being contradicted? In October, just as the Obamacare roll out debacle was beginning, Victor Davis Hanson described “Obama as Chaos,” noting that “when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?” As with the journalists who support Obama increasingly, and all-too-glibly noting that they’re OK with lying, why wouldn’t his subordinates take a similar postmodern view of what was once naively referred to as the truth?

Update: Heh, indeed:™

. New enrollee #Obamacare numbers released. 4 million? Byron York nails it here. #Fiscal #CCCOT pic.twitter.com/rL4wXX2STw

— Less Gov. More Fun. (@LessGovMoreFun) February 26, 2014