Democrats will let the president’s signature legislation die a painful death if Healthcare.gov isn’t fixed soon. Which is exactly why Obama is racing to fix this mess like Bush never did with his signature war.
Yes, the Affordable Care Act website rollout has been a fiasco. And, as always happens when political catastrophe strikes, the wave of bad analogies has rushed in its wake. One in particular is gaining ground: Healthcare.gov is for Barack Obama’s presidency what the invasion of Iraq was to George W. Bush’s administration, complete with outraged liberal reactions to it.
Here’s the funny thing: it’s a bad analogy, which could turn out to be accurate … but probably won’t.
To start with, the fact that people died in Iraq, as opposed to the inconvenience involved in a malfunctioning website, doesn’t make it a bad analogy. The analogy has to do with presidential decisions; it’s about process, not outcomes, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
No, what makes it a bad analogy is that Iraq War was misconceived from the start, and the actual events of the war, to a large extent, made obvious what some saw from the beginning.
With the exchanges, on the other hand, no one believes that they are inherently unworkable. Nor has the opening of the exchanges revealed anything fraudulent about the basic case Barack Obama made for passing the law in the first place.
It wasn’t “misconceived” yet The Idiot King is “racing to fix this mess”. Large undertakings that are well conceived generally include a proper plan of execution as part of said conception. But the author is a liberal, so he means “it feels good” rather than “it was well thought out”.
As for the nothing “fraudulent about the basic case Barack Obama made for passing the law in the first place” claim, we know how that’s turning out today.
Before the exchanges launched, the ACA supporters could live in a world of pure fantasy and pretend that all would be well just because that’s what their little toddler minds and hearts wanted. Now they have a few weeks or months of cover where they can pretend this is all about a website glitch. When that’s over another excuse will be in place.
Because the cult of personality around this president is so strong, the people who will be most disappointed by him aren’t going to keep delaying that until all about them is too catastrophic to ignore.
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