President Barack Obama’s defense at his press conference last Thursday was not only that he hadn’t lied about the healthcare.gov website being ready on time, but that he could not possibly have lied because he did not know. “On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as–the way it was supposed to. Has I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great.”
He was not “stupid enough,” the president said, to claim that the website would work if he knew that it would not. But on Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney admitted that President Obama had, in fact, been briefed earlier in the year about potential problems with the website. Even if Obama could not have known that healthcare.gov would be the massive disaster it now is, he was certainly aware of the problems.
The likelies reason Obama hyped the website anyway was not because he is “stupid,” but because he expects the media to cover for his mistakes, evasions and omissions the way they have every other time–from his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church, to the failure of the stimulus, to the Benghazi disaster. Each time the president fails, he claims he could not have anticipated the failure–and the media accept his excuses.
In an op-ed Wednesday, Peter Berkowitz notes numerous examples of the “stunning lessons that Obama professes to have learned on the job about how the world really works.” Berkowitz blames the decline of higher education at the elite universities that trained Obama and his cohort. Clearly, Obama’s arrogance is also to blame–an arrogance nurtured by his statist convictions and by the media’s eagerness to protect him.
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