Posted on 10/22/2013 2:58:01 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
President Obama is a gifted politician and knows how to win an election. But his spin on Healthcare.gov may only make things worse
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An IT problem has never escalated faster than the president's Rose Garden speech Monday addressing the problems with Healthcare.gov. He could no longer outsource responding to user complaints. At first, the White House had said the headaches signing people up for health care coverage were just technical glitches, but now the sheer number of those glitches defies that explanation. Reporting about deeper systemic problems suggest that fixes will not come quickly. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias explains, adding more bodies to the problem adds more complexity, which may exacerbate the problem. It's hard to untangle Christmas lights by committee.
Barack Obama doesn’t like to play the action-hero president where the application of his overwhelming will is supposed to directly correlate with a snappy solution. There are too many constraints on the presidency—Congress, a fickle public, world leaders, a $17 trillion economy, and the vagaries of time and space. But with the botched Obamacare rollout,the president was applying all the rhetorical torque he could muster. "Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should," Obama said on Monday, "which means it's going to get fixed."
Rhetoric and will isn't going to solve this problem. That helped the president triumph over the government shutdown and debt limit crisis, when through determination and superior political positioning he out maneuvered his Republican opponents. Now he has a different kind of challenge—an operational challeng—where his talent for politics and persuasion are less useful and may even make matters worse. Putting a good spin on things only sets expectations that can then be dashed by reality.
It’s a challenge of the president's own making.........
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
The Dems have begun panning Obamacare (its roll out, for now) because they must stall for time and divert public attention from their lock-step support of this socialist program - from their progressive agenda. They know Obama is lame-duck but they want to take the House in 2014 and control all 3 branches of Federal government for Obama’s remaining 2 years in order to remove all freedom, and install one-party government.
Three points:
ALL the Democats voted to give us Obamacare and ALL the Republicans voted against it.
Because of CRUZ and CO.’s push to forestall it’s implementation and alert the American people that Obamacare is killing the U.S. economy and destroying America’s healthcare system AKA “shutting down govt,” the Dems are on record as supporting this turkey (ads, ads, ads). Democrats up for re-election can run but they can’t hide.
We need to start calling Obamacare what it is, “The Spawn of Hillarycare!”
The liberals are already blaming the GOP and the shutdown, even though one of the few things Obama did not shutdown was the Obamacare roll-out.
I understand that the basic problem with the website is that they designed it to support 6 states and it’s supporting 36. They thought the states would establish their own exchanges and they thought wrong.
The president has shown what a good liar he is - that he has no qualms about lying to the American people.
Prolly needed massive doses of valium and vodka before heaving himself into the Rose Garden to tell us how great he is.
“I’ve seen IT guys come in and work diligently, day after day, on a problem like this, and get nowhere. ;-)”
Ah yes...”malicious compliance:” when the boss tells you to do something that you know it’s wrong and dangerously stupid, but you do it anyway because the boss is a pr!ck and deserves the crap storm that’s going to fall on him because you did what you were told to do.
It’s my favorite form of subversion!
I’d be willing to bet that there was more than a little malicious compliance at work here given the sheer stupidity of the demands the government was placing on these contractors. That part is amusing. What’s downright terrifying is that this regime tried to keep the prices on the exchanges secret until after one registered, so that they would have all your personal information should you ever deign to bitch about the cost of everything there!
Intimidation, anyone?
I have not visited that vile website and never will.
FUBO!
Mmmmmmmmm.....political theatre at its best.....Va's Cuccinelli has already grabbed onto this as a political issue.
For the Democrats, Obamacare is spiraling out of comtrol like a cancerous growth----more like an extremely virulent flesh-eating disease......spreading fast amongst the Dem political classes.
Good point. That may be one reason Marxism always always always ends up using force rather than marketing to impose their will. They really don’t get the power of a good product.
“Impose their will” should be “impose ITS will”
Sorry.
99.999% are POLITICIANS!
Grab them by the short hairs and read them the riot act.
They’ll follow the money because they are POLITICIANS!
There is only so much campaign money to go around - turn the ones who vote for their own survival (they can be removed later once a good conservative is found to replace them) and primary the ones who are in leadership and think they are untouchable.
They have to fear us more than they fear push polls.
I loved the first attempt to blame the mess on the Republicans: The people working on it were afraid the Republicans would subpoena their IT personnel.
They must have poll-tested that one and gotten nothing but maniacal laughter.
It is always about him.
I'm sooooooo mad, I'm going to hold my breath until it's fixed...
She's mad too, now you're all in BIG trouble.
David Horowitz:
“...........Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not been inside the progressive mind are able to grasp the cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the malice that drives its hypocritical passion for “social justice.”
No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no matter how terrible the futures they labor to create, no matter how devastating the human catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems ready to forgive their “mistakes” and to grant them the grace of “good intentions.” .......
............But they are lying. When they defend racial preferences now, for example, a principle they denounced as “racist” and fought against as “civil rights” activists then, even they must know it.
The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity, and often, therefore, without realizing that they are. The necessity for lying arises because it is the political lie that gives their cause its life.
Why, if you were one of them, for example, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role as part of humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth they could not “understand” and that would only servie to hold them back?
If you believed that others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.
That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth............”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Progressive%20Narcissism.htm
..and he knew it wasn't going to work
Exactly. You saved me the trouble of posting that.
President Petulant. Why should he give a damn - he's not subject to this abomination that he foist upon the American people. And I don't beieve it's capable of being fixed, not in the short term anyway. Further, it must not be fixed, it must not be patched, it must not be amended, it must be abolished!!!!
In the 90's one of my good customers awarded a large project to a competitor and 18 months and multiple of millions later, they asked us to look at the project.
Two of our best people examined the project plan, the time line , coding etc and decided that we couldn't fix it and that it couldn't be salvaged.
I by passed the IT Vice President and went to the CEO and told him we were going to pass and that this project was doomed to failure {I was a real star with the IT group/S}and our recommendation was to scrap it and start over.
They plodded on for another 8 months and then fired the VP in IT , scrapped the project and went back out for a new bid.
Great article, and so true. Thanks!
Marking thanks.
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