JAMES TARANTO: Who Sabotaged ObamaCare? Not Republicans, who opposed it openly and honorably.

One of the excuses for the technical incompetence of ObamaCare is that the president and his team were the victims of “sabotage” by congressional Republicans. Todd Purdum, a leftist longtime New York Times reporter, put forward this claim in a Politico op-ed last week, and yesterday the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, perhaps Obama’s most effusive male admirer, echoed it, citing a deeply reported story by his Post colleagues Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin.

The idea that Republicans have “sabotaged” ObamaCare is ludicrous on its face. Sabotage entails destroying or damaging something by subverting it–by stealthily undermining it from within. Republican opposition to ObamaCare has been neither stealthy nor “within.” Every Republican member of Congress has opposed ObamaCare consistently, openly and honorably.

But as the Goldstein-Eilperin piece demonstrates, there is some truth to the notion that Republican opposition has had a detrimental effect on ObamaCare’s technical efforts, and there is some truth to the notion that those efforts were sabotaged. But the truth is more interesting than partisans like Purdum and Capehart are capable of seeing. The Goldstein-Eilperin piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that “the project was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law–sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition.” . . .

The story Goldstein and Eilperin tell is one not of GOP sabotage but of Obama administration self-sabotage. The geniuses who were sure they were capable of running the entire medical industry were so unnerved by the prospect of political opposition that at every stage of the way they undermined the president’s own signature “achievement.”

This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote–and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan minority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: “Now, let’s face it, a lot of us didn’t realize that passing the law was the easy part.”

That’s what America gets for electing a president with charisma but no known skills apart (arguably) from delivering speeches.

Indeed.