Thanks, Obama!

In government, there are hard things, and there are easy things.

Hard things include making the choice to send troops into dangerous situations, deciding the appropriate balance between privacy and security or carefully crafting enormous pieces of legislation.

Making a functional website is one of the easy things.

But here we are.

Between Oct. 1 and Nov. 2, 701 Indiana residents were able to sign up for a health plan under the new federal exchange. That’s 701 people out of the 16,000 who applied.

That’s 701 out of the 500,000 eligible for coverage.

So, here in the Hoosier state, Obamacare’s operating at about 0.14 percent efficiency.

We’re not OK with that for many reasons.

First, Hoosiers need health care. Twenty percent of Indiana adults lack insurance coverage. Indiana lags behind the rest of the nation in many key health indicators, especially those concerning nutrition and preventable death.

One ranking named Indiana the 41st healthiest state.

Obamacare, when you can’t get the easy stuff right — like designing a website that people can use — then you really are shooting yourself in the foot politically.

The Democrats’ entire system of governance requires that people trust their government to get things right. Americans are notoriously anti-government, so this is hard enough to achieve.

But high-profile failures like HealthCare.gov make future Democrats have to work harder and harder to do smaller and smaller things. It’s hard to imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt getting the New Deal through Congress if he had just had an Obamacare website-sized screw-up.

It’s no secret that the IDS Editorial Board is dominated by liberals, so it’s not like Obamacare is the last of the Democratic policies we want to see.

America has many battles left to fight in which we need Democrats to carry the weight: overcrowded prisons, total equality across gender and orientation, welfare and education reform, and marijuana legalization.

The list goes on and on, but it gets harder and harder when the government can’t even make a functional website.

Wasn’t President Barack Obama supposed to be the “tech president”?

In the short term, it’s politically killing Obama, whose approval rating is sinking to new lows. As RealClearPolitics points out, that’s dangerous for Democrats in the upcoming midterms.

Obamacare’s failure will translate to Democratic losses, which means Obama will have to continue to work with a Republican House, which means that Congress is going to keep doing everything it can to ruin his life.

Independent of Congressional intransigence, the Obamacare website debacle still ruins Obama’s second term. He had many plans: immigration reform, first and foremost, but also climate change, education reform and tax reform. His presidency had the potential to be transformative.

Now, though, he’s fighting to keep it from being a failure. Instead of spending his political capital fixing America, he’s spending it fixing a website. Because, if the website gets fixed and if Obamacare survives, that’s his legacy. He’s fighting for his legacy.

All because his government couldn’t get the easy stuff right. That’s why he’s reportedly furious. And why we should be, too.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
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