Not since New Coke has there been an advertising campaign so well-funded and so ineffective.

◼ Obama's Rose Garden phony numbers 'tell' - Thomas Lifson/American Thinker

The April Fool’s Day show put on in the Rose Garden yesterday was no triumph, but rather an act of desperation, touting “enrollment” numbers generated without any transparency, intended to arrest the downward spiral of Obamacare and the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects. Obama himself gave away the game unintentionally, in what poker players call a “tell” that consisted of two parts.

The first part of the tell was the obvious outright lie told by the president in a “poor me” moment of self-pity. From the official transcript:

And we didn’t make a hard sell. We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials like some critics did.

Billions of dollars of commercials? Even if anyone believed the fairy tales about the Evil Koch Brothers, billions of dollars could not have been spent on anti-Obamacare commercials. That is the budget of an entire presidential campaign, planes, travel, and ubiquitous advertising, the whole nine yards.

The only advertising budget that even approaches that figure is the one spent by the federal and state governments promoting Obamacare. Last summer, the Associated Press tallied up the Obamacare spending plans of the feds and the states, and came up with the figure of $684 million. So lavish a marketing budget covered embarrassments like the $1.7 million tedious Richard Simmons video promoting Covered California...and a variety of other tasteless, ludicrous, and insulting initiatives like the infamous Pajama Boy....

The second part of the tell was the body language component. Missing from the platform was HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who now becomes the Official Fall Guy....

It is smoke and mirrors, but that is the way of Obama, and has been throughout his entire national political career.