On Fox News Channel’s “On the Record” Tuesday night, conservative firebrand and former presidential adviser Pat Buchanan criticized President Barack Obama on the heels of a March McKinsey & Company report warning of flaws in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, which was divulged by a House investigation.
Buchanan likened this situation to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba under former President John F. Kennedy.
“Six months before you got McKinsey & Company coming in and briefing them,” Buchanan said. “The president included, HHS, and saying you have got real problems with this. And what Carney is saying is, ‘Well, they told us they had these problems but they didn’t tell us they had those problems.’
“Who was responsible for this? This is an ongoing domestic Bay of Pigs. When the Bay of Pigs happened, Allen Dulles was gone. Kennedy said you know, ‘In the British system, Allen, I would go. He we are in the American system and you go.’ Do we have any names of the individuals who are briefed and all knew these things and then are still sitting right in there on top of this?”
Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” explained to host Greta van Susteren the problems have compounded for the president the more and more he has attempted to explain away the problems.
“Well you know, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” Buchanan, who held executive branch jobs under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, continued. “I think what you have got here — again, the president says one thing and then he moves it in one direction and then another — but you have almost got to read into it. And what you read into it: he really is a bystander president. He’s not getting on top of this. This is his primary domestic legislation. It is his legacy. It is what he wants to leave for the country, what he wants to be remembered by. McKinsey & Company comes in and says you’ve got a lot of problems with this thing, six months before the launch. He knows this. He has been briefed on this and nothing was done.”
As for the whole of Obama’s presidency, Buchanan said the president seems content with his achievements, despite some of the unintended consequences.
“Well, you know, I have argued for a while that when you saw he didn’t know about the IRS thing,” Buchanan said. “He didn’t know about Benghazi. Two weeks later is he talking about the video. He didn’t know Fox News had been wiretapped and everything. He didn’t know the AP — I don’t know that he is an engaged president who really wants to know. What it sounds like is he’s got a staff that’s like — he doesn’t even want to know those details.
“Look, my belief is, he is the first African-American president,” Buchanan added. “He was elected. He was elected twice. He has got a majority both times. That puts him in the history books. I don’t think he really cares about a lot of these things. But I did think he cared very deeply about what he feels — I mean he says, ‘Look, my achievements in my first term were equaled possibly by Lincoln, FDR and LBJ,’ you know. Obviously he feels this is part of his legacy. But he seems indifferent, having passed it, to how well it works out.”