You sure have missed a big opportunity in your obsessive campaign to discredit what once was known as the Affordable Care Act but has come to be widely referred to, not always affectionately, as Obamacare.
Last Tuesday, in a significant milestone for President Obama's signature legislative accomplishment, the administration opened up exchanges, online markets where people who have long needed it could buy health insurance.
Trouble was, the government website where this is supposed to happen was overwhelmed, Tens of thousands upon tens of thousands were unable to set up accounts that would allow them to shop for insurance.
Put this under the heading of: What were they thinking? Team Obama has been telling us for years how many people desperately need medical coverage. Yet, when its controversial program comes out of the gate, turns out that the website created precisely to make this happen is seriously overmatched.
Todd Park, the top U.S. technology official, told USA TODAY's Tim Mullaney that HealthCare.Gov was designed for a max of 50,000 to 60,000 users at one time. At some points, five times that many people were trying to climb on board. No surprise, given that there are 48 million Americans without health insurance.
Hadn't administration officials been keeping up with their own rhetoric? They've been telling us for years how many people need this. Why would they lowball the potential audience so dramatically?
The fiasco did nothing but give ammunition to critics who decry the new health care system as typical overreaching by clueless federal bureaucrats who probably couldn't change a light bulb.
In ordinary times, this would be the dominant news story. But here's where the Tea Party-infused House Republicans come in. Driven by their all-consuming hatred of Obamacare, the GOP shut down the federal government rather than allocate one penny for the hated initiative
That, of course, has become the nat! ion's overarching news story, overshadowing the shortchanged exchanges. A golden opportunity to showcase the glitches of the health care act was diminished.
The decision to go the shutdown route has drastically complicated the political outlook of the national Republican party and thrown some operatives into despair. Seizing on the unpopularity of Obama's plan, which it has done so much to foster, the party might have made next year's congressional elections a referendum on "Obamacare" in an effort to shore up its D.C. presence.
But the same polls that show negative sentiment about the health care plan also suggest that most Americans don't really think it's such a hot idea to close down much of the government simply to shutter Obamacare.
Now, the shutdown is likely to be a major focus in many races, putting the GOP on the defensive.
In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, it was obvious how pained top Republican strategist Mike Murphy was by this turn of events. You can bet he's not alone.
There aren't a lot of good things to say about a situation that closes the nation's national parks and Smithsonian museums while putting funding for children's nutrition at risk.
But you've got to say this for the shutdown and the numerous other Perils of Pauline government funding meltdowns: They certainly have expanded our lexicon.
The current debacle has given us the immortal "clean CR," as in House Speaker John Boehner's declaration Sunday, "There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR."
For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the latest in DC-speak, and who could blame you, "CR" means a continuing resolution that would keep open the spigot for of money to keep flowing to the federal government. And "clean" means it wouldn't be festooned with other wickets such as defunding Obamacare and mandating construction of the Keystone Pipeline.
Admittedly, "Give me a clean CR" is unlikely to dethrone "Give me liberty or give me death" ! and "Don'! t tread on me" in the pantheon of inspirational American battle cries.
Previous budget bloodbaths have given us many such gems. Among them is "sequestration," a word nobody had ever heard of a couple of years back, which is now a fixture in stories about the federal fiscal follies. It means "mindlessly slashing the budget so that everything is equally eviscerated regardless of need or merit."
Then there's "fiscal cliff," which refers to a combination of steep budget cuts and big tax increases that were scheduled to go into the effect at the beginning of this year, putting the economy at risk.
While budget catch phrases come and go, we can be sure there's one DC chestnut that we'll be able to savor for a long time. Given Washington's inability to fix anything, we can be reasonably confident that the lawmakers will continue to "kick the can down the road" for many years.
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