Obama's Moles

Playing Whack-a-Mole is never good if you're in political office. It's best left to the arcade world.

You know the game called Whack-a-Mole, right? You insert your quarters, grab the plastic mallet, and whack as many mole heads as you can in the allotted time. The heads pop up from different holes, at unpredictable times and locations in front of you. It's a harried, frenetic little game.

It's good arcade fun, but not so fun if you're elected. Even worse when you're the Most Powerful Man in the World.

President Obama is playing Whack-a-Mole, and it's killing his second term. Maybe his presidency as a whole.

The president, these days, is reduced to going before the American people and apologizing for a website. And, for being less than forthright about whether people could keep their existing health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And he's making policy changes to the ACA on the fly.

It's all Whack-a-Mole stuff.

As president, you always want to move forward. John Kennedy said he sought the presidency because "it's the center of action."

The last thing you want to do as president is spend all your time fixing mistakes and saying you're sorry.

Obama's second term has ground to a halt. Some of it is his doing, some of it isn't. There's nothing moving forward. He's stuck in this "Obamacare" rut, like a man in quicksand. He has to keep whacking moles.

The Whack-a-Mole thing is what turned Dave Bing's run as mayor into vapor. I'm not sure if Bing will ever be properly judged on his being mayor of Detroit, because he never really governed---he played Whack-a-Mole. His time to run was 10-12 years prior. By the time he decided to jump into the fray, things were so far gone, he couldn't govern for the future because he was too busy trying to fix the past.

Obama is being attached to the ACA at the hip, as he had hoped, but now it's for all the wrong reasons.

The stock photo of the young lady on the Healthcare.gov website is becoming more iconic than the law itself.

Maybe this clunky roll-out of the ACA---and it has been the clunkiest---will correct itself and in time, millions of Americans will be happily signing up for health care as easily as they can buy something online from Amazon.com.

Maybe.

But even if that time does come, will it come soon enough to erase the embarrassment of how unprepared the government was when the curtain was raised on the ACA on October 1?

I can only imagine how apoplectic Obama must be behind the scenes. It's amazing that no one of any significance has been fired. This roll-out has made the president looking like a political eunuch. I wouldn't want to be the person or persons who is in any way responsible for making the president look anything other than presidential.

The president keeps putting quarters in the machine. It's not a good way to govern. In fact, it's the worst.








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