Throwaway Lines, Then and Now

Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

● “Revealed: Obama came up with ObamaCare [in 2007] because he needed a throwaway applause line in a campaign speech.”

— Headline by Allahpundit of Hot Air, September 23rd, 2013.

● “First of all, the President is so mad about about this that he himself with go down and supervise the writing of code if this is not fixed by the end of November.”

— “Embarrassingly lame joke Jennifer Granholm had ready for her ‘Meet the Press’ effort to buck up support for Obamacare,”  spotted by Ann Althouse, today.

As Glenn Reynolds Insta-quips in response to the latter post, “Well, he’s a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, and a better political analyst than his political analysts, so why wouldn’t Obama be a better coder than his programmers?”

I’m sure in the president’s mind, all of those assertions are true.  Quoting some of Mr. Obama’s utterances on his favorite subject (himself), Jim Geraghty wrote last year, “It appears one of the great challenges that President Obama has had to overcome in office is that no one around him is as good at their job as he is.”

It’s a challenge that seems to grow exponentially larger for the president every day.

“Unexpectedly,” as Bloomberg.com would say of the latest poor business news.

Related: “Obamacare was designed to convert insurance companies into government-serving utilities, selling government-designed one-size-fits-all products at government-determined prices. Now watch the insurance companies get blamed for doing what the government forced them into.”