Tuesday Open Thread [11.19.13]

“Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal government’s healthcare website, enrollment is surging in many states as tens of thousands of consumers sign up for insurance plans made available by President Obama’s health law,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November… The growing enrollment in those states is a rare bit of good news for backers of the Affordable Care Act and suggests that the serious problems with the law’s rollout may not be fatal, despite critics’ renewed calls for repeal.”

Same thing will happen on the federal exchanges once the website is working properly. The real story of the Obamacare rollout is not a non-working website or insurance companies cancelling policies on 3% of the nation’s populations, it is the media coverage of both. Jonathan Bernstein argues that the recent two weeks of anti-Obamacare stories is mostly a media-driven phenomenon:

The last media frenzy about Obama’s collapse (not counting a smaller one over Syria) came in the spring, when Triple Scandals threatened to destroy him. But those scandals fizzled prematurely, leaving the scandal-loving press with a bad case of frustration. Indeed, as Brandon Nyhan was writing before those Triple Scandals, Obama was way overdue for something like that. When it didn’t pan out, the press was presumably still primed for a pile-on, and even though ACA implementation may not have been a promising topic, they worked with what they had.

In other words, it’s like Whitewater because it’s the result of the press primed and ready and waiting for something to blow up around. It’s different because there is a real story here, but that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how the press is behaving. Like Whitewater, or like the Triple Scandals from April, the phony frenzy part of this will blow over soon. But not before there’s plenty of damage – to the reputation of much of the working press, that is. There’s this week’s real fiasco.

Right. Because, eventually the website is going to work, and eventually people will be signing up, and eventually, those having their plans cancelled will have new and better (and in most cases) and cheaper plans. I am now convinced that Watergate was the worst thing to ever happen to this country, not because it revealed a criminal president in Richard Nixon and removed him from office, but because it convinced the media that they must always treat every story as a scandal that will bring down the Presidency.

Senate Republicans “denied President Obama his third nominee in recent weeks to the nation’s most powerful and prestigious appeals court and insisted they would not back down, inflaming a bitter debate over a president’s right to shape the judiciary,” the New York Times reports.

“Unlike previous fights over judicial nominees, this one is not driven by ideology or divisive social issues like abortion. Republicans have raised few objections to any of the candidates’ qualifications or political leanings. Rather, Republicans are trying to prevent Mr. Obama from filling any slots on the court, fearing that he will alter its conservative tilt.”

Go nuclear on their asses. Because I guarantee you, the instant the Republicans are in the White House with the Senate under their control, they will.