Who's in Charge Here?

Michael O’Brien:

Even Democratic allies of the administration question why Obama didn’t know about the serious problems, and express concern about his personal response.
“I think he might have been better off by standing up and saying this happened up on my watch and take responsibility for it. I think that’s better than saying he didn’t know,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “I think people expect the president, on his signature program, to be on top of it.”

“The president’s certainly got some work to do in getting people focused on his agenda,” added Democratic operative Jamal Simmons, who floated the idea of the administration bringing in an adviser from outside Obama’s close-knit inner circle to shake-up internal thinking. “Mainly it just seems that the White House has been reacting to issues as they arise and not getting out there and setting the agenda.”
David Axelrod, a former top aide to Obama, told NBC News that the president needs to be vocal in his response.

I’m of two contradictory minds on this. One, they thought it would work; they really did. The other, they’re trying to crash the system alá Cloward-Piven. The way HHS wrote the insurance regulations suggests the latter. The White House’s reaction suggests the former.

There’s a third possibility which just came to mind, suggested by something Roger L. Simon wrote a year or three about. I don’t have time to find a link, but Roger’s in-person impression of Wiggleroom was of somebody who didn’t really believe in much anymore. He was steeped in revolutionary Marxism at home and faculty room Marxism at school, but real-word experience had discredited Marxian thinking and left Wiggleroom with… not much to replace it. I’m paraphrasing broadly here, but that’s the gist of what Roger was left with after meeting the man.

So suppose then that ObamaCare is just the result of a sort of reflexive statism endemic to an intellectually exhausted progressive lefty. The left had always wanted to centralize health care, so they did just that in the only politically possible way at the earliest possible moment. Not much thought then was given to practicality or workability of the law itself — just to whatever was politically doable in the moment. And the President, whose own fingerprints are actually nowhere to be found on the law bearing his name, happily signed the thing thinking it was some sort of grand achievement. That it turned out to be a mess doesn’t require any conspiracies; it merely requires a left-thinking President without a philosophical core, doing whatever was political expedient to achieve somebody else’s dream.

It all fits, and even passes Occam’s Razor.