Marc Lamont Hill Defends Obama During Heated CNN Debate: 'He’s Not Webmaster in Chief'

[Tx4obama]

Marc Lamont Hill Defends Obama During Heated CNN Debate: ‘He’s Not Webmaster in Chief’

With the new November 30th deadline to fix the problems with HealthCare.gov just 28 days away, CNN anchor Fredricka Whitfield invited CNN political analyst Marc Lamont Hill along with former spokeswoman for President George W. Bush, Mercedes Schlapp to discuss what President Obama needs to do to regain the trust of the American people when it comes to his signature legislation.

-snip-

Schlapp began by calling these last few days “an embarrassing week for the president,” given the disappointing initial enrollment numbers. She said the president is “trying to make ground in terms of explaining why the launch was so dysfunctional, so messy,” but in her view has not succeeded.

Hill conceded that, as Whitfield suggested “everyone can agree” that the rollout has been an “embarrassment” for the White House. But he was not willing to place the blame for the problems on President Obama. “He’s not the webmaster in chief,” he said. “There are people under him whose job it is to make this work.” Hill “strongly disagreed” with the idea that the website problems are a “referendum on health care itself.”

-snip-

Hill said he doubted that this would affect Obama’s “long-term legacy” noting, “we are in a 24-hour news cycle, where everything is the most important thing at the moment, and then later on down the line it’s not.” He predicted that within three months, no one will be talking about the Obamacare website.

-snip-

Full article and VIDEO here: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/marc-lamont-hill-defends-obama-during-heated-cnn-debate-hes-not-webmaster-in-chief/

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Good point. You'd think once he fired the people who #%^*ed up, the press

would have realized he meant business.

Oh, wait, ... never mind.

[brush]

2. He did

The original web site builder, a private company btw, has been replaced.

Guess the repugs don't want to talk about how it was privatized and was screwed up by a company that donated heavily to Romney.

And here I thought privatization was their big thing.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Who hired and oversaw them?

Whoever allowed that contractor to fail should be on the street.

[brush]

4. Who do you suggest

Sebelius? Maybe the repug govs and health administrators who did their best to sabotage the roll out by not setting up exchanges in their state should resign as well because it seems to be working pretty well in states where exchanges are set up.

There's a lot more to the bad roll out than a firing because of all the behind the scenes machinations to disrupt the roll out.

[Gore1FL]

5. The only reason the right wants Sebelius to resign is so they can block a new nominee. n/t

[brush]

10. Good thought. I think you're right about that. nt

[geek tragedy]

15. They want to derail ACA implementation and collect Obama admin scalps too, but you're right nt

[DallasNE]

8. IT Projects Often Fail Because

The boss doesn't want to hear bad news so the development team will always report that they are on schedule. When projects are authorized the estimates nearly always are optimistic and unreasonable then they blame the coders when the crappy estimates prove faulty. If a project plan calls for the project to be 75% complete on December 1st the management report will say it is 75% complete even when it is know to be only 45% complete. Projects are prioritized on ROI and if you want yours to go to the front of the line then you need to turn in the best ROI numbers and then deal with the consequences of the missed deadlines later. It is just how the game is played. And it appears that this is what happened here as well. The Contractor shortly after Labor Day testified under oath that they were on target for a successful launch on October 1st. So how much do you trust what you are being told? Lastly, I can't imagine how this application would require over 5 million lines of code. I've worked on systems I thought were big and they had maybe 500,000 lines of code, or 10% of this.

[brush]

11. Thanks for the insight, DallasNE

It's good to get a glimpse into how IT projects work.

[90-percent]

13. American Management

This is the end result of American Managers not being capable of performing the work they supervise. So they resort to this American only mgmt fallback; "If you can't do the job, we'll find somebody who can."

They live in a binary world - the job is either done or it isn't. regardless of how unreasonable their demands on workers are. The more oblivious they are, the easier it is for them to make unrealistic demands on their workers. That's why everything is going great on a project until the day of the rollout, when it crashes and burns. Workers interested in keeping their jobs simply hide the truth from their bosses for their own self preservation.

This also foments fierce internal competition, where one way to win is to sabotage your co-workers. Now how is that sort of behavior in any way good for the company?

-90% Jimmy

[DallasNE]

18. CIO's Can Be A Fickle Lot

It was roughly 30 years ago I was working on a small project that was being used to evaluate a new 4th generation software package. The product was really quite good but that was the infancy of online applications and this product would display your password as you keyed it in rather than the string of dots you see today. I had called the software vendor and reported this shortcoming and they had told me that they were aware of the problem and were actively working on a fix but it would be weeks before it would be rolled out. Generally the CIO would not set in on a demo of new software development because if he did that would be about all he would ever get done but being they were evaluating an expensive software product he wanted to be invited. The demo seemed to go very well and the CIO seemed quite pleased but a few hours later he returned fuming about the password issue and said the project was not approved. I tried to explain that the software vendor said a fix was in the works but would not be available for a few weeks. He pulled the project from me on the spot. He also approved the purchase of the software a few weeks later so go figure. I always presumed that the end user demanded that heads roll over the password issue and that is why the CIO was first very pleased and then very angry -- he got his butt chewed by someone not understanding the state of the art technology and this was how he got back in the good graces of the end user. My guess is that they delayed the implementation until the fix from the vendor arrived and all was happy. While I wasn't fired, my career was damaged and I moved on a couple of years later.

[Fumesucker]

9. No one could have predicted the Republicans would try to sabotage the ACA roll out n/t

[geek tragedy]

12. So now you're joining the Republican "fire Sibelius" chorus over website glitches? nt

[MannyGoldstein]

14. Not necessarily

It depends on who at HHS really owned the project and screwed it up.

But... remember the Outrageous! Outrageous! IRS fake scandal a few months ago? Obama instantly fired the head of the IRS, who had nothing to do with the fake scandal and was not heading the IRS when it happened. Interesting.

[geek tragedy]

16. And who was going to retire/resign later in the year already.

Also, a glitchy website is not a scandal.

[MyNameGoesHere]

6. Well he didn't know about it

his staff didn't tell him it wasn't working.

[Skittles]

7. I wish they got as upset over senseless wars

as they do over a screwed-up website

[BumRushDaShow]

17. "no one will be talking about the Obamacare website...."

they will be back talking about "Benghazi!!!11!!!!111!11".

[Coyotl]

19. The Rs are trying to Benghazi everything.

Benghazi has become a verb.