What?! Now Comrade Obama wants to delay the individual mandate, himself?!

And if the lock on the Toyota dealer's door is broken, obviously this means Toyotas are all terrible cars, total failures.

Talk about seeing what you choose to see, and if it's not there, see it anyway.

 

You probably don't understand this, but unlike in a small business, what you have here is a very vertical command structure. This means there are AT LEAST 17 layers of management between the programmers falling behind and trying to hit a moving target, and the President or even Sibelius. And as you rise through all those layers, what each higher layer knows is more abstract and summarized, and less detailed. And each layer is motivated to sugarcoat the problems before reporting it up the chain, so each higher layer is not only LESS informed than the next one down, but also a bit more MISinformed.

Now, you can (and certainly I do) fault this sort of organization, because problems like this (upper layers under political pressure cannot afford to know what problems lower layers are having) are pretty normal.

So we have two distinctly different questions here. I am asking "is it Obama's fault this project got bungled?" and you are asking "How can we MAKE it Obama's fault this project got bungled?" So the answer to my question is "very little if any" and the answer to your question is "by SAYING it's Obama's fault." And we are both right!

 

As a matter of fact, I work upper mgmt in a large global corporation. If a logistics VP suggested that we invest a large amount of capital to move a mfg facility to Brazil, it was approved and he was lauded for this great idea, he was made the exec leader of the project with multiple departments, their leadership, regional directors, multiple functional VPs, governments, outside contractors, etc. all spewing forth data to a project controller which reported to the VP in question, when the project falls flat on its face due to any of the aforementioned functions' activities, the VP will be fired. Even though he has a vast array of responsibilities outside of this project, he is responsible and failure is a reflection of his errors in management.

I agree completely with this assessment in government which is why I never advocate for government to try to undertake something that they are not structured to achieve.

I am not asking how to make this Obama's fault. I am simply stating that without a doubt, this is Obama's fault. I am not leaping to conclusions. I am not on a witch hunt. I do admit that seeing someone smugly tout their ability to raise chickens while holding a mojority of rotten eggs gives me the perception of a little of intrinsic value hoping that some lesson may have been learned, but in turn, I would have congratulated, admitted my error in previous doubts and added this to my "learned lessons" vault if it would have defied logic and came off without a hitch.

Additionally, I think that you are ignoring that this is Obama's biggest source of pride of his Presidency to date. If he were at all capable of preventing the disasterous implementation that we have seen, he would have done so. The biggest gap in our thinking here, is that I pity the President for not having the ability to admit that he routinely fails in almost anything that requires the level of abilities expected from someone in his station and you simply lower your expectations of the abilities of the POTUS.

 

House votes to delay Obamacare for a year, government shutdown looms



Washington (CNN) -- House Republicans pushed through a spending plan early Sunday morning that would delay Obamacare for a year and repeal its tax on medical devices.

The vote makes the chances of a government shutdown Tuesday increasingly likely.

That's because passage of the amendments sends a temporary budget resolution back to the Senate, where Democrats vow to again block the anti-Obamacare amendments.

President Barack Obama has added a veto threat to that position.

Without a deal, a government shutdown will begin at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

A Senate Democratic source told CNN there were no plans to convene the Senate before Monday, when the current fiscal year ends.

The decision to vote on the House amendments Saturday night emerged from a rare weekend GOP caucus meeting called by House Speaker John Boehner.

The votes, taken after midnight, were 232-192 for the Obamacare delay, and 248-174 for the medical device tax repeal, mostly along party lines.

Two Democrats voted for the Obamacare delay: Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, and Jim Matheson of Iowa.

Seventeen Democrats voted for the tax repeal.

 

Well, sort of. The best face I can put on it is that he has a zillion responsibilities, all pressing. Jimmy Carter showed that trying to stay awake 20 hours a day to be right on top of every one of them doesn't work. So he assigned this development process to someone, who assigned it to someone, who selected a contracter from the approved list, who designed it all wrong (WITH the caveat that the spec kept changing, often and seriously, for political reasons), and failed to keep his finger on the lack of progess following the late start, etc.

The most likely face I can put on it is that Obama didn't want to hear that it wouldn't be ready on time. In large organizations I've been with (including government), this is entirely tacit. Bureaucrats KNOW what their boss doesn't wish to hear, which is bad news. They also know about plausible deniability - that if nobody gives the boss the bad news, nobody gets his head bit off and the boss can claim he wasn't kept properly posted and fire someone, anyone, as a fixup.

And the worst face (which I doubt but can't rule out) is that Obama was aware from the start that the project was a mess and getting worse, and either had no clue how to correct the problems, or was concerned that any attempt at correction would be seized on by his political opponents as further ammunition during a period when he was fighting to keep the government funded and the debts paid. I can just imagine his frustration being in the middle of a pitched and highly partisan fiscal battle against my-way-or-the-highway no-compromise extremists, KNOWING that his signature program was going down for the third time in the background.

But whatever, there has to be both proximate and ultimate responsibility. If a low level GE accountant is embezzling, the proximate fault is the embezzler and the ultimate responsibility is Jeff Immelt. And in the Obamacare fiasco, I'd like to understand the proximate responsibility. WHO was it who decided to spawn so many cookies that logins got DDOSed? And WHO was supposed to recognize this idiocy and nip it in the bud? There's a lot of responsibility to go around here. If everyone is responsible, then nobody is responsible. And if no heads roll here (if CGI remains on the approved list, etc?) THEN we need some accountability.