On Tuesday’s “The Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume called the the Obama White House’s continued defense of the disastrous Obamacare rollout “claptrap.”
Hume singled out press secretary Jay Carney’s sidewinding over the problem-plagued rollout of the HealthCare.gov wesbite.
“There is only one word for that line that Jay Carney was trying to take there,” Hume said. “It was claptrap. The president said something unequivocally. It was absolutely comprehensive and the scope is a promise. It didn’t have anything to do with what the regulations would say. It was just nonsense. And the problem that this causes, Megyn, is that this sort of stuff feeds the story. That sound that you just played will play in many other places as well. It makes news because it is so extraordinary. So you know, they’re trying to stop the bleeding, and this is the worst way to go about it.”
The Fox News senior political analyst attributed the muddle to the White House’s seeing the world differently from the way outsiders see it. But he added that as the problems continue to develop for Obamacare, this is a “potential earthquake.”
“So far it doesn’t look very good, does it?” Hume replied. “I mean, he seems to be willing to leave it on the website. As Sen. [Mike] Enzi just pointed out the promise still stands on the White House’s own web site. So you know, I don’t think they wised up to this yet. You know, I noticed this a long time ago and I’ve noticed throughout the years in Washington, Megyn, is that the world always looks different from inside the White House than it does from the outside. All of us on the outside can all see what the president said was palpably untrue and likely was known to be untrue at the time by him, even. And this excuse-making and blaming the insurance companies, and pretending that it was not an untruth is not working.”
“But there is reluctance on the inside, where the world sometimes looks different,” he continued. “I can’t believe it will look different much longer. I mean, the president — you cited those numbers from Gallup. There was an earlier AP poll, which I certainly doubted that reflected similar numbers. But I think it will only get worse because the number of people who lose their policies is not going to shrink. It is going to grow. And when the cancellations and the changes in the corporate policies and other large group policies begin to hit, we are hearing about small business policies now, it is going to get worse, and worse still. People are already up in arms. This is a potential earthquake, politically.”