Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Sunday that people across the country are now questioning whether Barack Obama is a competent president, citing the disastrous rollout of Obamacare.
Asked about the troubled HealthCare.gov website, Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Yes, this really feeds into the president’s competence. That’s really the question that the people have: ‘Is the president competent to do his job?’ And Obamacare is certainly front and center.”
“What’s going on in the Middle East is another area,” Santorum added. “There’s a whole group of issues now that people are questioning.”
Santorum was also skeptical of the White House’s claim that HealthCare.gov was up and running. (RELATED: Officials claim partial of Obamacare website, fail to meet user success target)
“I talked to some people in the insurance industry this morning, and they told me that most of the front end may be looking good,” he said. “People may be able to get on and get responses, but the information coming out the back end to the insurance companies is still garbage.”
“There’s all sorts of problems with the data coming into the insurance companies,” he added. “So you think you may have signed up, but you may not, because the insurance company may not have the data available to actually put you in the system.”
Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, disagreed with those arguments.
“I think the president can right this ship,” Dean said. “This website is now apparently functional now. I haven’t tried the website. But if this program works, and I think it will, three months from now, a huge number of people who didn’t have health insurance are going to have it, and mostly at a better price. I think that’s the proof in the pudding.”
As for how the rollout affects Obama’s political standing, State of the Union host Candy Crowley pointed out that a CNN ORC poll indicates 59 percent of the country thinks things are going badly.
But Dean argued that Santorum was wrong to suggest the website failures will have lasting damage for Obama.
“I think there’s no evidence for that at all,” he said. “Again, I think that’s right-wing talking points against this president. They’ve from Day One when he got in there. They tried to undermine him as a human being.”