◼ Low-Information Leadership - Peggy Noonan/The Wall St. Journal
...The program he created in 2009-10, ran on in 2012, and whose implantation he delayed until one year after that election—in retrospect, that delay seems meaningful, doesn’t it?—has turned out to be wildly misleading as to its basic facts.
Millions are finding you can’t keep your plan, your premium, your deductible, your doctor. And millions more will discover this when the business mandate kicks in.
All of this—the fraudulent nature of the program—came as a rolling shock to people the past two months.
It’s a shock for most people that it’s a shambles. A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work? Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?”...
The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches.
Because the doing isn’t that important, the talking is....
◼ Peggy Noonan Wants to See ‘Embarrassed’ Obama Show ‘Humility’ Over Obamacare Failures - Noah Rothman/Mediaite
“I look at the White House the past two months, I think the president and those around him perhaps do not understand deep and serious history well enough to understand the size and scope of the debacle they’re in,” Noonan said. “They keep handling it as a problem, so they keep jerking forward with different ideas each day and different approaches.”
“It’s the oddest handling of an authentic crisis I’ve ever seen,” she added.
