2013
Following are the last paragraphs from a piece by Peggy Noonan in the WSJ on Saturday, October 26, 2013. The article is about the launch of Obamacare, but as you see it is really about a much deeper concern. I found this summary a bit frightening, but sadly quite accurate. Something is seriously wrong in the way this President acts and reacts to issues. The words Teflon Don come to mind [you may need to be from the Northeast for that one].
And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government’s ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.
He talks but he doesn’t implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.
We’re all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he’d blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.
It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
(You reprinted the paragraph about Kennedy twice.)
Ms. Noonan is unfairly conflating the actual effect of the new law with difficulties people are having in enrolling for the program. The goal of the ACA isn’t to build an awesome web site. It’s to provide health care coverage for people who previously couldn’t get it. The web site roll-out failed. The program hasn’t even gone into full implementation!
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You have a point, but a close look at the structure of the law make it pretty clear the law will not lower costs but rather increase them over time. It will disrupt the health benefits offered by employers and eventually be as unaffordable as Medicare (in far fewer years).
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