ANGRY OBAMA
Gives his staff ‘unsparing’ dressing-down.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama was seething. Two weeks after the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov, Obama gathered his senior staff members in the Oval Office for what one aide recalled as an “unsparing” dressing-down.
The public accepts that technology sometimes fails, the president said, but he had personally trumpeted that healthcare.gov would be ready Oct. 1, and it wasn’t.
“If I had known,” Obama said, according to the aide, “we could have delayed the website.”
Obama’s anger, described by a White House that repeatedly has sought to show that the president was unaware of the extent of the website’s problems, has motivated the West Wing staff. Senior aides are racing to make sure the website is fixed by the end of the month as they confront the political fallout from presidential promises, now broken, that all Americans who liked their existing health-insurance plans could keep them.
Inside the White House, there is anxiety that if the health-insurance problems are not righted, they could imperil the rest of Obama’s presidency, especially as criticism grows that the president misled consumers about the plan. Obama sought to tamp down that criticism by apologizing in an interview with NBC News. “I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me,” the president said.
Internally, Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, is in charge of damage control. He leads a health-care conference call at 6 p.m. Central daily, just before a written update on the broken website is inserted into the briefing book that is delivered to his boss in the White House residence. McDonough is also the primary conduit to angry Democratic lawmakers who are seeking to delay parts of the law and extend the enrollment period until the problems are fixed.
Still, McDonough has insisted that other work continue as the White House struggles to find a balance between operating in perpetual crisis mode and moving on with the rest of Obama’s agenda.
So daily “check-in” sessions on the push for an immigration overhaul still happen every morning. There are regular West Wing meetings on transportation, college affordability and a new farm bill.
Obama talked about increasing exports in a speech at the Port of New Orleans on Friday, and he is planning a trip next week to talk about the economy.
“People expect us to fix the d*** website,” a senior White House adviser said. “But they want us to move on and stay focused on improving the economy.”
Some Democrats close to the White House, however, think that the administration is not sufficiently panicked by the health-insurance problems and urgently needs to step up its response.
They say that the president and his staff do not recognize the full threat to his legacy, and they worry that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, is not equipped to pull the administration out of the morass.
“They are going to have to start thinking about some options,” said one Obama ally familiar with internal operations at the White House. “They need to get ahead of it somehow.”
Geoffrey Garin, a top Democratic pollster with close ties to the administration, said that although “it is not in their nature to panic,” White House aides “understand that panic elsewhere can create its own vortex,” especially among Democratic lawmakers who face re-election next year.
“I’m livid that this screwup actually plays into the hands of the critics,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., referring to Republican plans to use the bungled health-insurance rollout as ammunition in 2014.
Pressure to demonstrate visible action helped lead the president to appoint Jeffrey Zients, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, to orchestrate the website’s repair. Working with private-sector technology whiz kids out of a makeshift “war room” in Herndon, Va., Zients has pledged a workable website by the end of the month.
“I think they do realize that this is DEFCON 1,” said one close outside adviser to the White House.
Other allies of the president are urging the White House not to let Obama get swallowed up by the healthcare issue the way that the BP oil spill crisis in the summer of 2010 pushed aside virtually everything else.
“They have made a strategic decision that they can’t let this become like BP — the only story out there forever,” said one Democratic ally who has talked with senior White House staff members in recent days. “There are other things that they are going to push forward.”