In a televised apology that had more than a few questioning his sincerity, Barack Obama bemoaned to NBC that he was personally “burned” by the public relations disaster, and in the case of millions of Americans — a financial disaster, that is the opening weeks of ObamaCare, as reported by the right-of-center news portal Mediaite.com on Nov. 7, 2013.
I Take Personal Responsibility… Well, Sort of…
When queried by NBC’s Chuck Todd of the Affordable Care Act website, HealthCare.gov, that has been plagued by a plethora of constant bugs and breakdowns, Obama did hold himself accountable but then quickly qualified “I” to “my team”:
And, you know, I take responsibility of that. My team takes responsibility of that.
And we are working every single day, 24/7, to improve it.
Nobody’s More Frustrated, Outraged, Interested, Concerned, Despaired, Offended, Committed …
Those expecting Team Obama to actually fix the immediate internet problems as a 24/7 priority will have to stand in line to the number of other priorities the Frustrated-in-Chief has placed at the head of the line:
- “Nobody’s more frustrated by that [the ObamaCare roll out] than I am.” (October 21, 2013)
- “Nobody’s been more outraged [by the I.R.S. scandal] than the President of the United States.” (May 20, 2013)
- “Nobody shares the frustrations of the American people [during the shutdown] more than I do.” (October 15, 2013)
- “There’s no person who is more committed to acting on this moral obligation we have than the President of the United States of America.” (January 16, 2013)
- “Nobody is more interested… than me in seeing this economy growing strong.” (October 18, 2011)
- “Nobody is more interested in finding out exactly what happened [in Benghazi] than I do [sic].” (October 17, 2012)
- “There’s not a person here who has just felt that sense of despair in watching the broadcasts about the [BP] oil spill down in the gulf. Nobody is more upset than me.” (May 25, 2010)
- “Nobody is more offended than me by some of the anti-gay and lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.” (August 12, 2013)
- “Nobody’s more concerned about their [U.S. diplomats] safety and security than I am.” (October 17, 2012)
- “The bottom line is nobody is more committed to manned space flight, to human exploration of space than I am.” (April 15, 2010)
“I’ve Been Burned…”
Speaking without the aid of notes or the oft-parodied TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States, which brags its own Seal, blog and Twitter account) Obama caught his verbal gaffe when he groused “I’ve been burned” and quickly shifted to “the American people” when he went a bit deeper into his personal feeling of a half a billion taxpayer dollars spent on a web portal that by all industry standards, doesn’t work:
Uhh.. given that I’ve been burned already with a website — well, more importantly, the American people have been burned by — a website that has been dysfunctional.
