http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/10-people-obama-should-fire-over-healthcaregov-100080.html?hp=r510 People Obama Should Fire Over HealthCare.gov
By KEITH KOFFLER
November 19, 2013
President Barack Obama has gamely acknowledged that the HealthCare.gov disaster is “on me,” and surely this is one of the more accurate assertions he’s made related to his signature health care program.
But no president could have pulled off HealthCare.gov alone. After all, as he put it, “I don’t write code.” It truly takes a team effort to come up with something so impressively catastrophic.
Indeed, this serving of Pasta Fiasco was whipped up by a cadre of chefs, toiling together in spectacular incompetence, each doing their part to create one of the greatest flops in modern political history.
Each should be marched right out of the kitchen with alacrity. But Obama, who once said during another crisis — the 2010 Gulf oil spill — that he was searching for an “ass to kick,” hasn’t really found one this time.
And yet, with respect to the creation of HealthCare.gov, there’s really no shortage of asses. Herewith, as a service to our flummoxed commander in chief, 10 candidates for the chopping block.
1. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough
This goes without saying — and actually, that’s the only reason I can think of that no one’s saying it.
Obama claims he didn’t know how badly the website would perform. And yet, given that it had failed rudimentary tests and wasn’t even close to being ready, people in the administration had to know.
It is the White House chief of staff’s responsibility to ensure the right documents and people are getting before the president — to establish a smooth process by which the president gets the information he needs.
Obamacare is the ballgame when it comes to the Obama presidency. Ensuring it was up and running right should have been McDonough’s can’t-fail mission. According to a June 20 article in Time magazine, McDonough was supposedly spending “two hours a day” on Obamacare implementation. If that’s so, it’s inexcusable that he somehow missed that the website was months from being ready — even with the current “24/7” fix-it drive — at launch time.
If Obama requires any further reason to cashier McDonough, he need only survey the wreckage of his second-term agenda and his cratering approval ratings.
continued at link