As NewsBusters has been reporting, the Obama-loving media are clearly sickened by how the rollout of the President’s signature piece of legislation has gone.
Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday, National Journal’s Ron Fournier excoriated Obama’s performance in the Rose Garden the previous day and said of Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “Maybe she should have been shown the door” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
RON FOURNIER, NATIONAL JOURNAL: A quick disclosure: my family is already benefiting from ObamaCare. I want ObamaCare to succeed. I want my family to be able to continue benefiting, and I want 40 million Americans without health insurance to be able to get it. But when I see this administration spend an unforgivable amount of money on a website that doesn't work, and then the President of the United States gets out there yesterday and instead of taking responsibility and say "I'm going to fix it" and rolling heads, he diminishes the significance of what's been happening, he points the fingers at the Republicans, and doesn't really take full responsibility and hasn't rolled heads.
We had the secretary of HHS, a woman who I really respect and I’ve known for a long time, Kathleen Sebelius, but she was sitting in the front row. Maybe she should have been shown the door, frankly. And maybe, real quickly, Mika, maybe all the folks who are making money off of President Obama right now who worked on the campaign and technology and did state-of-the-art technology work, maybe they should be in the White House today working for a dollar a year if it takes a year to fix this to get this done.
Now watch co-host Mike Brzezinski shamelessly try to defend the president she loves:
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, CO-HOST: I don't disagree with a number of those things, Ron, but didn't he, Nicolle, say he’s going to fix it? That was the first thing on Ron's list of criticisms for the president yesterday. That was what he went out there in front of the country to say.FOURNIER: He didn’t take responsibility for this, and he’s got to take responsibility. Do you, I'm assuming you agree with the fact that ObamaCare is something that's already helping families, and if you can't get this done right, the hardest part is still coming as Jeff was saying. This is the easy part. I you can't get this right, how are you going to do the hard stuff?
Exactly right. And no matter how painful it might be for them, this is what media need to focus on now.
The website WAS the easy part. This is 2013 for goodness sake. Anyone can launch a website.
If the current administration can't even do that - with almost infinite finances at its disposal and several years to do it! - how can it possibly be trusted to manage 1/6 of the nation's economy.
In the end, it has clearly shown it can't, and this should be the story in the current months NOT the old news which is the website's failings.
Will that be the case? Will media make this Obama's Hurricane Katrina moment?
Stay tuned.
