I’m on record stating (as I did most recently on October 17 in “Republicans Grant 90-Day Reprieve from Economic Armageddon”) that everything from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2013 government shutdown seems pursuant to an open conspiracy to make America look like a dysfunctional Banana Republic.
Why? To propagate a specious correlation between America’s waning influence and prestige around the world and the election of its first Black president, hoping to ensure that no Black would ever be elected president again. Never mind that the Republican politicians and conservative talking heads propagating this correlation are the only ones responsible for making America look like a dysfunctional Banana Republic.
Too cynical, you think? Well, what else do you think explains Republicans deciding just hours after Obama won the presidency that their number one objective is not to help make the country better, but to make him a failed, one-term president? What else do you think explains their pathological commitment to this objective being such that all Republicans want to do is repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which guarantees 40-50 million of their fellow citizens the basic human right of affordable healthcare?
This is all that counts for Republican political fare these days, notwithstanding the plainly urgent need to reach a comprehensive budget compromise with Democrats and pass legislation to create jobs, deal with illegal immigration, and rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, among other things.
Why? To deny Obama credit for the truly historic legislative achievement Obamacare represents. Period.
Which brings me to the horrendous rollout of the online Obamacare portal, healthcare.gov. I assure you, the irony is not lost on me that the “glitches” that have beset this website since it launched on October 1 have given Republicans fodder to propagate the fiction that Obama is presiding over a Banana Republic. But, as Obama himself conceded, if Obamacare were just this online portal, Republicans would be right to ridicule it as an abject failure.
Obamacare is obviously so much more. And it’s an insult to the intelligence of every American, and an almost criminal disservice to the millions of uninsured, for Republicans to suggest otherwise.
Apropos of which, consider this: would you stop paying your car insurance if, because of computer glitches, you had to go down to the local DMV to pay your premiums in person? Of course not! You would do whatever is required to pay them. After all, those glitches would have no bearing on the underlying benefits your car insurance provides.
Therefore, why, pray tell, would any sensible person deprive herself of the underlying benefits health insurance provides just because computer glitches are forcing her not to go anywhere, but merely to sign-up on the phone from the comfort of her home?
Yet to listen to Republicans waxing triumphant because of these glitches, you’d think Obama had conceded that Obamacare itself was an abject failure. Continuing the analogy, this would be akin to all insurance companies conceding that, due to computer glitches, they can no longer sell car insurance. Imagine the folly inherent in that.
What troubles me about this folly, though, is the extent to which erstwhile sensible people are buying into their anti-Obama(care) narrative. This is especially so with respect to poor, uninsured (White) people. Again, to complete the analogy, it is so self-defeating as to be inhuman for anyone to forego health insurance just because of some temporary computer glitches.
On the other hand, it’s hardly surprising that a few insured, fair-weather Democrats are buying into it hook, line, and sinker:
Several Democratic senators are calling on the Obama Administration to delay enforcement of the health care law’s individual mandate, joining their Republican colleagues in saying it would be unfair to penalize Americans for failing to buy insurance when the primary sign-up website doesn’t work…
The Democratic dominoes began to fall quickly Wednesday, after Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., circulated a letter urging President Obama to extend enrollment beyond March 31, 2014.
(FOX News, October 24, 2013)
Never mind that it is (and always was) a given that Obama would no sooner charge Americans a late-enrollment fee because of his computer glitches than AETNA would charge a late-premium fee if its computer glitches made timely payment practically impossible. Of course, one of the many reasons for Obamacare is that some insurance companies are so crooked and amoral, they would try to get away with it….
But politicians are such opportunistic grandstanders that they would circulate a letter urging God to have the sun rise in the east and set in the west if they thought that would get them favorable media coverage….
Still, nothing vindicates my take on this sideshow quite like last week’s congressional hearing. As expected, Republicans were reveling in the spectacle of getting the contractors involved in building the lemon of a website at issue to point the finger at each other.
Their revelry was short-lived, however, for Democrats soon began hoisting them up by their own petards by reading into the record what they said about the Medicare prescription drug benefit for seniors (aka Part D), which former President George W. Bush championed and signed into law in 2003.
‘This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches,’ Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) said on February 15, 2006…
‘Rather than trying to scare and confuse seniors, I would hope that we can work together as we go through the implementation phase to find out what is wrong with the program and if we can make some changes to fix it, let us do it and let us do it on a bipartisan basis,’ Barton pleaded during an Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on March 6, 2006…
‘Any time something is new, there is going to be some glitches,’ Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) said on April 6, 2006.
(TPM, October 24, 2013)
Their hypocrisy was evidently too much for Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey to stomach. For here’s how he refused, with unbridled contempt, when the aforementioned Rep. Barton asked him to yield so that he could get in another Republican talking point about what an unprecedented, irredeemable, and hopeless mess healthcare.gov has made of Obamacare:
Barton: Will the gentleman yield?
Pallone: No, I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever this thing is.
(C-SPAN, October 24, 2013)
But, lest you think it was only mad-hatter, Tea-Party Republicans who were caught in this brazen vice-grip of hypocrisy, here’s how Sahil Kapur of TPM recounted the fateful words of no less a person than Speaker John Boehner in his October 24 memo:
A few weeks into the launch of the most sweeping health care reform law in a generation, John Boehner declared that the implementation was a disaster.
‘The implementation, the Republican leader [now Speaker] said, ‘has been horrendous. We’ve made it far more complicated than it should be.”
Boehner, of course, was talking about the rollout of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit – known as Part D.
That said, I fully expect that by next summer healthcare.gov glitches will seem like ancient American history. Moreover, by then so many Americans will have signed-up for Obamacare that even anti-Obama(care) darlings like the Black Dr. Ben Carson will be trying to whitewash their criticisms from the annals of history.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that this celebrated doctor (and unwitting Republican rabbit for the 2016 race for president) lost whatever political credibility he had, not to mention making a mockery of whatever Black consciousness he had, when he damned Obama’s efforts to provide healthcare (of all things) to tens of millions of poor Americans as follows:
Obamacare is the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.
(Washington Times, October 11, 2013)
Anyway, after Obama made it clear during a Rose Garden address on Monday that nobody is more pissed off about these computer glitches than he, the White House announced that its “tech surge” of new experts will have the website fully repaired and functioning by the end of November.
But I’m among those who find it utterly unacceptable that Obama has not fired anyone over the crisis of confidence these glitches have caused in the signature legislative achievement of his presidency.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius was ultimately responsible for building healthcare.gov; therefore, she should have resigned, on day one, when it became clear that trying to navigate this website was like trying to navigate the Cretan labyrinth.
When she didn’t, Obama should have demanded her head on a silver platter … for all the world to see. Especially given the way he made such a public show of hiring IT specialist Jeff Zients to clean up the healthcare.gov mess she allowed to build up right under her nose.
Alas, as I lamented to one of my old friends, Obama seems to think that it’s more important to fire lowly White House staffers (like Jofi Joseph) for tweeting snarky comments about his incompetent Cabinet secretaries than to fire those Cabinet secretaries for their incompetence.
In fact, besides providing more fodder for Republicans to ridicule him as a weak and feckless leader, Obama’s failure to fire Sibelius is so indefensible that his former chief of staff, William Daley, was reduced to pleading (on Thursday’s edition of CBS This Morning) that there’s no point in firing her now because:
That would be like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after the ship hit the iceberg.
Unfortunately, it seems lost on Daley that, as inadvertently damning as his analogy is, if Captain Edward John Smith had survived, justice would have demanded he be not only fired, but prosecuted.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Sunday, at 6:49 am