Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, longtime newsman Tom Brokaw admits that he didn’t do his job.
GREGORY: “Tom Brokaw, is this a low point of the presidency?”
BROKAW: “Well, there have been several low points, but this is certainly a low point at a critical time, coming into the 2014 elections, and a lot of Democrats beginning to bail on the idea of Obamacare. What was striking to me about that statement, ‘We should have been aware.’ I would think, given the importance of Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act, eight months ago the president would have started every meeting with, “How are we doing? Is that going to be ready? That’s going to be our big play for the second term,” and demanding from Kathy Sebelius and other people who are involved in it that they were ready. And sending people over there to take a look at the rollout. That it suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos, and it’s not going to be an easy fix, is just inexplicable.“
But is it really “inexplicable”? Millions of Americans saw this train-wreck coming years ago. We saw it in Obama’s lack of experience. He wasn’t ready for the job, and nothing in his past suggested that he was. We saw it on what the Democrats were doing and how they were doing it.
Obama and his media allies smeared us.
Even Barack Obama telegraphed that his signature program probably wouldn’t hit without being a significant mess. Roll tape on this clip from the 2008 presidential debates.
OBAMA: My greatest strength, I think is the ability to bring people together from different perspectives. To get them to recognize what they have in common, and to move people in a different direction. And as I indicated before, my greatest weakness, I think, is when it comes to — I’ll give you a very good example. I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it because I will loose it. My desk in my office doesn’t look good. I’ve got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff. And that’s not trivial, I need to have good people in place who can make sure systems run.
Five years later, Obama’s “greatest strength” doesn’t really exist. He never brings people of different perspectives together. He is a divisive ideologue. He opened his presidency telling his opponents that since “I won” he could do whatever he wants, before ramming sharply partisan policies and nominees down the country’s throats. He appointed the likes of Communist Van Jones to his cavalcade of czars, to keep them outside congressional scrutiny. And he did Obamacare — badly.
His self-confessed “greatest strength” had never been demonstrated in office and had already been shown up as a weakness years ago. If “reporters” like Brokaw would have done their jobs, Obama probably would never have been elected.
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