Unlike some of the so-called scandals the have plagued the Obama administration, including Benghazi, Operation Fast and Furious and the National Security Agency spying allegations, the glitch-riddled Obamacare rollout is playing out differently, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume said Monday.
On “Special Report,” Hume explained why it is different and why it will continue to be something the administration will be forced to deal with.
“One thing that politicians caught in a firestorm such as the current one swirling around the president’s health-care plan can hope for is that the thing will quickly die down once the news value is exhausted,” Hume said. “Unfortunately for the president, that does not seem to be happening. First came the website fiasco, then the stories of hundreds of thousands of policy cancellations. That’s now followed by reports of people losing their doctors as well. Incidents are now beginning to surface of people who managed to log on to the Obamacare website, being shocked at the prices of available health plans or the size of deductibles, or both.”
“Now comes news the site will go down each night as the administration troubleshooters rewrite more and more of the code,” Hume said. “Given the security issues noted in that earlier report on this broadcast, would you be willing to provide private health information to a site undergoing such changes? Added to all of this is the mounting sense that President Obama’s repeated assertions that you would be able to keep your plan and your doctor were no mere exaggerations but knowing and deliberate falsehoods. It would be one thing if all this were playing out in only one segment of the nation’s media. But this time, the media as a whole are coming down the administration’s smokestack. And the administration’s continuing evasion and excuses seem only to be feeding the story. As the saying goes, ‘This thing has legs.'”
“Special Report” anchor Bret Baier pointed to a New York Times editorial suggesting that Obama only “misspoke” when he made the now-false claim that if you like your health insurance plan, you could keep it. Hume said that editorial was an outlier and noted that the “conventional wisdom” suggests the fallout is negative.
“Clearly misspoke, what some 20-some times?” Hume said. “Well, even the newspaper’s ombudsman was critical of that editorial, and I have to say, Bret, I think it stands alone out there. The paper’s own coverage and that of much of the rest of the mainstream media has been delving into this with decidedly negative consequences for the administration. I was watching a morning show on another channel which I occasionally check to see what the conventional wisdom is about things in Washington this morning, and it was all negative. And we saw a piece of it — Robert Gibbs there, saying it was a mistake and so on. The administration has very few defenders here, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better.”