http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/?hp=ar By REID J. EPSTEIN |
11/17/13 9:28 AM EST
President Barack Obama’s mishandling of the Affordable Care Act rollout has been incompetent, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said, but it doesn’t rise to past president-dooming scandals.
“What this is, it’s a mess, clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the president’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance,” Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”
Asked by Fox host Chris Wallace if the Obamacare implementation revealed “rank incompetence,” Woodward agreed.
“There’s no question about that,” he said. “But you see all of these stories and this frenzy out there, the game over, the presidency is over some people are saying, and I think that’s not the case.”
But Woodward did say the ACA rollout is a harbinger of bad things to come for Obama’s White House.
“When you go down the road, it’s going to get worse,” he said. “It’s going to blow a hole in the budget when you go two or three months from now… All of a sudden this is going to come on the table and people are going to say, ‘My God it’s going to cost much more money than we thought before. How you disentangle this is now on Obama’s head.”
