End Times for Obama? Why This Crisis Will Also Pass

[DonViejo]

by Michael Tomasky Nov 8, 2013 8:15 PM EST

The Obamacare website situation is bad—but it’s not a make-or-break moment for this presidency. It’s just another round of the media’s trumped-up crises.

It’s damn near end times for Barack Obama, to hear some tell it.

There’s a new Pew poll that has him at 41 percent approval, 53 disapproval, which Pew notes ominously is only five percentage points better than George W. Bush’s at this point in his term. (Hurricane Katrina had happened in August of Bush’s fifth year.) Conservative columnists are chuckling and clucking and tweeting to beat the band. Centrist journalist Mark Halperin, on MSNBC yesterday, declared that Obama had lost the media, which was now cheering against the success of the Affordable Care Act and just wants to see… well, people go without insurance, I guess. If everything—everything!—isn’t fixed by Nov. 30, we’re looking at a presidency that is going to collapse into utter disaster.

It’s obvious enough why conservatives would be saying this. They’ve wanted Obama to fail from the start, and they’ve certainly wanted the health-care bill to fail from the moment of its passage. Journalists like Halperin say these things not for ideological reasons, but temperamental ones: In this Halperinesque/Politico-esque world view, politics is less about people’s lives than it is about who is displaying mastery of the game and who is being mastered at any given moment (of course, seeing politics so insistently through that lens is a kind of ideology of its own, but we’ll let that pass). To that group of mainstream journalists, how Obama handles the current crisis will determine whether the administration will survive or whether he might as well just resign now.

I don’t deny that the current situation is a crisis, and one of the administration’s own making. Obama misled people. It’s a small percentage of people. They’re at the mercy of the most horrible end of the private-insurance market, and the vast majority of them are going to be better off after everything shakes out and they see that their new plans are largely better than their old ones were. But even so, they’re people, and they’re getting termination notices, and he misled them. Combine it with the website chaos, and it’s bad, there’s no sense in denying it.

What I do deny, vigorously, is that this is a make-or-break moment. Yes, I know that Obamacare is his signature initiative and all that. And I know that if problems persist after Nov. 30, pressure will mount on Harry Reid to let some kind of tinkering legislation be debated. This is a very important three weeks for the administration, and the 30th is an extremely important deadline.

full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/08/end-times-for-obama-why-this-crisis-will-also-pass.html

[Proud Liberal Dem]

1. Rumors of President Obama's (political) death

have been greatly exaggerated and prevalent since he was elected. He has been rendered (largely) legislatively ineffectual by Republican Tea Party since 2011 but has still accomplished a lot during his Presidency, some of which, thankfully, he didn't have to rely on Congress to accomplish. No matter the mistakes he has made, he still can't ever match George W. Bush's record of incompetence, mismanagement, and poor decision making.