Remember Obama Girl, the bikini-clad ingénue who lit up YouTube in 2007 by announcing her crush on the future president? She's been replaced in the popular consciousness by Obamacare Girl, the anonymous face of Barack Obama's troubled health-care reform. Her smiling mug dominated the homepage of Obamacare's still malfunctioning website until her picture was removed this week, proving that the site's operators could at least do one thing right.
The journey from Obama Girl to Obamacare Girl, from infatuation with the dreamy Mr. Right to alternating exasperation and boredom with Mr. Righteous, is a sad story of betrayal. Candidate Obama was the star of one of the most brilliant election campaigns in U.S. history, a modern John Kennedy who would erase the country's red-blue and black-white cleavages by sheer force of personality. But President Obama is an insular leader who, at home and abroad, alienates the people he needs to persuade to get things done.
Fresh from his apparent (and rare) victory over the Tea Party Republicans who forced this month's government shutdown, Mr. Obama should be riding high, using his replenished political capital to move forward on immigration and budget reform and asserting the U.S. role in world affairs. Instead, even The New York Times fears he has become a "bystander" president.
It was bad enough that Vladimir Putin hoisted him on his own petard over Mr. Obama's on-again off-again plan to strike President Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria. Mr. Putin's humiliating outmanoeuvring of Mr. Obama, which yielded a deal to destroy the Syrian regime's chemical weapons stash, may be for the better. But it exposed Mr. Obama's confused foreign policy. He avoided the Syrian issue as long as he could and only improvised his way out when cornered. No wonder Forbes just named Mr. Putin as the world's most powerful person, bumping Mr. Obama from top spot.
Administration officials' assertions that Mr. Obama didn't know the U.S. National Security Agency had been eavesdropping on friendly foreign leaders for years have provoked a mixture of outright disbelief and horror at the thought of a commander-in-chief so clueless about his own intelligence apparatus.
That fateful question – What did the President know and when did he know it? – doesn't just haunt Mr. Obama on the spy file. The botched rollout of the President's health-care law threatens to do far greater damage to his political standing.
Revelations that the administration knew in 2010 that millions of Americans would lose their existing health-care coverage – and be forced to purchase more expensive plans once Obamacare kicked in – contradict Mr. Obama's oft-repeated vow that "If you like your health insurance, you can keep it."
So far, about two million Americans have received notice from their insurers that their coverage will not be renewed because their plan does not include one of the mandatory benefits the law requires. The logic of why a robust 27-year-old single man needs to pay for maternity coverage is lost on average people. But in order for Obamacare to work, the government needs the young and healthy to pay more for insurance in order to subsidize the poor and sick who will gain coverage.
Faced with huge premium increases, however, many young and healthy people will choose to pay a nominal fine ($95 U.S. in the first year) rather than doling out thousands of dollars for insurance they won't use. That threatens to undermine private insurers' financial stability.
Conspiracy theorists on the right figure this has been Obamacare's goal from the get-go: to buttress the case for a single-payer, government-run health system. I seriously doubt that, given the power of the insurance lobby. Rather, Obamacare, rushed through by a Democratic Congress in less than a year, is a technocratic nightmare whose unintended consequences are undermining its good intentions.
The Obamacare website's disastrous debut – which the President may or may not have been warned about weeks before launch – is the tip of the iceberg. When the so-called employer mandate takes effect in 2015, millions more Americans will lose employer-provided health insurance and be forced to buy it (likely at much higher prices) on the open market. Walgreens, Sears and Olive Garden have already notified their workers that they will be given lump sums to buy private insurance.
Republicans shut down the U.S. government over Mr. Obama's refusal to defer his health-law for one year. Maybe the President who stood his ground then should have caved – he might actually look less lame now.
Konrad Yakabuski