Walter Russell Mead piles on:
All this has plunged the White House into the deepest hole of the Obama presidency to date, but the biggest shock isn’t about the cruddy rollout, the kludgy law or the disingenuous sales job by which it was passed. The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:
“OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”
This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.
However, Instapundit cruelly, but necessarily, points out that Mead voted for the guy:
“And much as I love Walter Russell Mead, I note that he voted for this guy, and blandly assumed that an Ivy League pedigree was some sort of assurance of competence. Not so much. And it’s not as if the signs weren’t there, for those able to see them.”
I can only assume Mead hasn’t had much contact with Ivy League graduates. For the most part, their uselessness is only surpassed by how impressed they are with their own academic credentials. And the more Affirmative Action the Ivy League graduate, the more hopelessly inept they tend to be. Think about what knobs your class president and valedictorian were. Then recall that with the exception of Brown and Dartmouth, the Ivy League universities are absolutely full of class presidents and valedictorians who are firmly convinced that, as Chiefs, they don’t have to know anything about how all that Indian stuff works.