Fournier wrote Monday: President Obama needs to fire himself. Not literally, of course, but practically: He needs to shake up his team so thoroughly that the new blood imposes change on how he manages the federal bureaucracy and leads. A series of self-inflicted wounds during his fifth year in office, capped by the botched launch of the Affordable Care Act, have Americans questioning the presidents competence and credibility. History suggests that second-term presidents rarely recover after their approval ratings fall as much as Obamas have this year… The Affordable Care Act fiasco underscores the need for a significant overhaul. Despite three years to prepare, the HealthCare.gov website didnt work upon launch, and the president misled millions of Americans by promising during his reelection campaign that they could keep their insurance plans and their doctors. As The New York Times reported Sunday, the story of how Obamas team responded to the failures reveals an insular White House that did not initially appreciate the magnitude of its self-inflicted wounds, and sought help from trusted insiders as it scrambled to protect Mr. Obamas image. That description is a damning indictment that could be applied broadly to the Obama years. For all his strengths, Obama is a private, almost cloistered, politician surrounded by fawning aides who dont understand why anybody would object to his policies; thus they are often caught flat-footed by critics. They often put political tactics ahead of governing, protecting the presidents image with narrow-minded zeal. Short of resignation, can you think of anything Obama is less likely to do than follow Fourniers advice? Overhauling his cabinet would be a de facto admission that hes been wrong about a lot of things from the beginning. He was wrong about the workability of the Obamacare legislation as a whole. He appointed the wrong people to his cabinet and shouldnt have trusted them with these responsibilities. He didnt take the early warnings seriously enough. Sometimes hell come close to acknowledging these hard revelations and the enormity of these mistakes -- what were also discovering is that health insurance is complicated to buy -- but he usually brushes them off or quickly discards those inconvenient truths before their ramifications sink in. He doesnt know how hes doing, and over the weekend, he told us that he still doesnt know why he doesnt know: Were evaluating why it is exactly that I didnt know soon enough that [the site] wasnt going to work the way it needed to. Think about it -- at the end of November, two weeks after this major failure, hes admitting hes still not sure why he was in the dark about it for so long. Unless hes lying, he still doesnt know who was responsible for keeping him informed about the sites problems and why they didnt tell him. There is little or no indication that anything has really changed after this massive failure. This epic obliviousness to how things are really progressing around him leads to catastrophically bad decision-making. How different would the political scene look today if, back in late September, President Obama had said, fine, Ill accept a one-year delay in the individual mandate to avoid a government shutdown?
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:31:38 +0000