Tina Brown, who is leaving her position as editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast which she founded in 2008, had a few choice words regarding the rollout of ObamaCare, castigating Barack Obama’s defining accomplishment for issuing portentous announcements with an incompetent follow-through.
She wrote:
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it’s supposed to. Even awesome Apple, mighty Microsoft, and gargantuan Google miss deadlines.
Not only is the tech itself full of glitches and gremlins, but the “content” it conveys requires very different species of people to collaborate in ways they never will. Techies know they hold all the cards to the obscure and procrastinate on the grounds of engineering mysteries. The information or editorial people feel so passé and irrelevant that they never voice their secret fears that what is moving inexorably forward makes no discernible sense. When panic sets in, they regress completely and start ordering up things that are technical flops, too. Then everyone braces for this car crash they hope won’t metastasize into a train wreck…
Brown is not shy about denigrating Obamacare itself:
Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that’s no excuse. Lost in the raucous cable noise are the voices of desperate people shut out yet again, this time by incompetence. And that’s tragic, not uncool. That’s obscene, not a juicy partisan spin for Ted Cruz. How ironic if Obama’s signature accomplishment becomes instead a metaphor for his presidency’s signature problem: big pronouncements and lousy follow-up, the curse of our times.
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