Issues

Republicans couldn’t defund Obamacare, and Democrats seemingly can’t defend it. Some states (where there’s competition) are seeing lower insurance rates, and some (where Republicans blocked competition) are having sticker shock.   Nobody understands what Obamacare is, but everybody understands a website that won’t work, so we’re obsessing about that.   Maybe we’re overcomplicating this. Maybe…

For a year we’ve heard how the digital geniuses in the Obama campaign demolished Mitt Romney. Now they can’t make the website work for the biggest thing in his administration?   This might say something about the difference between campaigns and governing – or between the private sector and the public sector. Government IT programs…

A government shutdown’s turned out to be a peculiar sort of beast.   First, before a shutdown, every politician – in both parties – declares the government shutting will be terrible. Awful. Armageddon. And every politician swears they want the government to stay open.   Then the government shuts down.   Next one group of…

What if Obamacare flops? What if the public has sticker shock? What if voters blame both sides for the shutdown?   From the White House down, Democrats seem awfully confident the shutdown-Obamacare standoff will end well for them.   Plus, they say, Americans will love Obamacare once they get to know it. But suppose all…

Talk about strange things happening: Up in Washington two tribes of politicians have been pummeling each other night and day over who deserve the blame for shutting down the government.   Then, unexpectedly, one tribe changed directions.   First the House Republicans voted to fund national parks and monuments, then they voted to fund part…

Look at the news this week, and you see that Republicans made a classic PR mistake: They stepped on their story.   For them, the best story would be problems, questions, concerns and online glitches with Obamacare. Instead, that story is competing with shutdown fallout: national monuments closed, WWII veterans turned away, school tours cancelled,…

The politicians, when you get down to the short rows, are the varmints who decided to hang  a ‘Not Open for Business’ sign on the federal government – but, in an odd way, it wasn’t the politicians who were pouring gas on the fire.   In the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle and…