On Friday, Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer said ignorance should never be an excuse for the Obamacare rollout, which he called “a colossal failure.”
Schweizer appeared on Fox & Friends a day after a shocking GAI report was released that found President Barack Obama has had only face-to-face meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius since Obamacare’s passage, a revelation that left the co-hosts speechless.
Schweizer suggested Obama was either completely disengaged or Machiavellian in not meeting more with Sebelius, noting that it gives Obama “some plausible deniability” in claiming to not know about the potential problems of HealthCare.gov, allowing Sebelius to take the fall for all of Obamacare’s problems.
But Schweizer emphasized that ignorance should never be an excuse for a leader.
“If you’re an executive you need to know for sure–for darn sure–that the rollout is going to work and it’s going to go well,” Schweizer said. “And it’s really incumbent upon a president to contact the people that are involved in this initiative.”
Schweizer said presidents consult their top advisers in times of war and peace and that “there’s just simply no excuse for him to be this detached on this important piece of legislation which is reorienting one-sixth of the national economy.”
In a piece he wrote for Politico, Schweizer made similar points, mentioning that “perhaps the insular White House team wanted to distance the president from the bureaucratic process in the hopes of granting him a halo of deniability if the launch failed.” He also noted “the lack of meetings reinforces the severity of what the New York Times describes as the ‘deeply dysfunctional relationship between the Department of Health and Human Services and its technology contractors, and tensions between the White House chief of staff and senior health department officials.'”
On Fox & Friends, Schweizer said that Obama has admitted that he was not a “hands-on” type of president. Schweizer said leaders need to “surround themselves with people that recognize their shortcomings or their weaknesses.”
That is not the case with Obama, Schweizer claimed, because Obama’s top advisers like Valerie Jarrett “don’t challenge” Obama’s weaknesses and “reinforce this notion that he is so brilliant.” Schweizer also blasted the White House’s spin that the problem with Obamacare is with the implementation and not the policy, noting that the inherent nature of the plan led to the botched rollout and implementation.
The Government Accountability Institute report found that since Obamacare was signed on March 23, 2010, Obama met with “various Cabinet secretaries a total of 277 times,” but his presidential schedule did not “document a single one-on-one meeting” with Sebelius of the Department of Health and Human Services, though there was “one instance of Secretary Sebelius meeting jointly with the President and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner.”
According to the White House schedule, Obama “met with secretaries from the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury for 263 (95%) out of his 277 face-to-face meetings.” Obama also had meetings with “secretaries from the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs… [including] two meetings with the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus (not an official Cabinet level post).”
As Breitbart News has reported, GAI “recorded listings as they were contained on the White House and Politico presidential calendars; other forms of communications, such as private emails or phone calls, are not able to be quantified.”
Schweizer had previously said there was no evidence on the White House schedule that showed Obama cared about Obamacare.
“In the case of President Obama, if you look at his calendar, there is no evidence whatsoever that he is focused or has much interest in health care at all,” Schweizer said on Fox News’s Hannity on Wednesday.
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