Actually, This Question Could Be Asked About Everyone in the Obama Administration

“Why Does [Kathleen] Sebelius Still Have a Job?”, asks Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics:

Unlike the real world, where managers and employees are judged on results and held accountable for their performance, in Washington, D.C., loyalty and partisanship almost always come first. Accountability comes later, if it comes at all.

This happens in every administration, and President Obama’s is no different, as we’ve seen with the fatal mistakes made regarding the Fast & Furious gun program and in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats, claiming to see these as partisan witch hunts designed to hurt the administration politically, circled the wagons. Obama stood loyally by Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.

Loyalty is generally a good thing, in politics, as in life. But Kathleen Sebelius and her agency’s rollout of Obamacare is different.

Sebelius’ department had 3½ years to prepare to implement the Affordable Care Act. No one ever suggested that commandeering one-sixth of the American economy would be an easy task. (Many Republicans suggested the opposite and were dismissed as killjoys for their efforts.) But after the debacle of the last two weeks, liberals and Democrats—not conservatives or Republicans—should be calling for Sebelius’s head.

The administration’s handling of the implementation of Obamacare over the past three years has been a slow-moving train wreck: a mixture of embarrassing delays, hard-to-justify waivers, and assorted bad news about the unintended consequences of the law. Some of this was Sebelius’s fault, some of it was not.

The crowning blunder came 10 days ago with the rollout of healthcare.gov website, the centerpiece of the administration’s effort to sign individuals up for coverage through the government-run health care exchanges that are at the heart of the legislation. To say this was vitally important to the overall success of the law is an understatement. It is the aspect of Obamacare that the president himself has said is utterly essential—and backed up those words by letting the federal government shut down rather that give in to Republican demands to gut it. Nonetheless, its premiere was a giant flop – and Kathleen Sebelius is responsible.

Referring to Sebelius’ disastrous appearance on the Daily Show, Bevan writes, “When the Obama administration loses Jon Stewart, you know things are bad. But supporters of Obamacare have a right to be furious with Sebelius. Her agency’s bungling has put Obama’s signature achievement, and his legacy, at risk.”

Of course, the more conspiratorial will at this point consider that ObamaCare was designed to fail in the first place — and given the century-0ld history of socialist government failing into larger and larger forms of socialist government, they might be onto something. But I doubt very much that Sebelius knowingly hired onto the administration to be ObamaCare’s fallgal.

Forward!

Update: “It’s fun to see Obamacare turning into a laughingstock. A reader sent this [slightly modified] screen grab from the Obamacare web site, Healthcare.gov.” In the sentence, “feel free to click around this Website for a few hours though. I won’t stop you,” I initially misread the spelling of “click” as a word that might have been even better…