Today is the Obama administration’s self-imposed deadline for Healthcare.gov to be “fixed.”
After initially promising a complete fix of the broken Web site by “the end of November,” the White House has incrementally lowered expectations, moved the goalposts and backpedaled on earlier promises as the depth and intractability of the site’s problems became apparent during November’s “tech surge.”
So the administration had absolutely no choice but to declare victory today and deem Healthcare.gov to be sufficiently “fixed” for them to claim that they kept their promises and met the deadline:
HealthCare.gov team claims victory: ‘We have met the goal’
The Obama administration claimed victory Sunday for making HealthCare.gov workable for the vast majority of users….
But even during their victory dance itself they were still moving the goalposts and backpedaling further:
The agency that oversees HealthCare.gov said “we believe we have met the goal” of making the systemnavigable for most people, but cautioned that more problems may lie ahead.
“Dramatic progress has been made,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated in a report released Sunday morning. “[But] there is more work to be done to continue to improve and enhance the website.”
…
Administration officials acknowledge that there are more errors to fix with HealthCare.gov. The severity of these issues is unknown, and it is possible that some have yet to be discovered.
“As with any web project, there is not a magic moment [for completion], but a process of continual improvement over time,” CMS communications director Julie Bataille said Sunday.
The problem for the administration is that they moved the goalposts so often over the previous five weeks that they have already lost the messaging war.
One is reminded of the “Mission Accomplished” gaffe which many pundits now see as the PR snafu which began the unraveling of the Bush administration: Shortly after the successful 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush appeared on an aircraft carrier to give a speech to the troops, and behind him was a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.” In truth, the specific mission of invading Iraq, overthrowing the government and occupying the country had been accomplished — but over the subsequent months it became clear that quelling the Iraqi insurgency was far from accomplished, and that the war had just begun. Thus the moment became an iconic symbol of a broken presidential promise.
And so today’s declaration of victory over rebellious html code will come back to haunt Obama for the rest of his term.
Why?
I list five reasons...