Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty October 30, 2013 Be careful out there. It's Mischief Night. Let the Roasting of Sebelius Begin! Today, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius will go to Capitol Hill and attempt to avoid lying under oath with one simple message: "It's all CGI's fault." Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius plans to tell the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the private contractors who built HealthCare.gov are at fault for the site's many problems. Tuesday night, CGI pre-empted her testimony with a simple, well-timed release: The Obama administration was given stark warnings just one month before that the federal healthcare site was not ready to go live, according to a confidential report obtained by CNN. The caution, from the main contractor CGI, warned of a number of open risks and issues for the HealthCare.gov web site even as company executives were testifying publicly that the project had achieved key milestones. But the CGI document, which describes "top risks currently open" and "outstanding issues currently being mitigated" says the testing timeframes are "not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities" and lists the impact of the problems as "significant." Another element is listed as " not enough time in schedule to conduct adequate performance testing" and given the highest priority. One concern, listed as "severe," warned, "CGI does not have access to necessary tools to manage envs in test, imp, and prod. Specifically (1) we don't have access to central log collection / view (2) we don't have access to monitoring tools. We have repeatedly asked CMS and URS but haven't been granted this access." As CNN helpfully notes, "the warnings run counter to Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' stated optimism to CNN's Sanjay Gupta that when she woke up October 1, things would go smoothly." The confidential memo might as well have been titled, "Our Warning to You Idiots for the Record, to Be Cited When This Blows Up in Your Faces." In Sebelius' reaction to her biggest and most important responsibility blowing up like the Hindenberg crashing into the Titanic, we get another key lesson in how the administration operates. When bad news pops up, they never confront it directly. They insist it isn't as bad as it looks. They attack the messenger. They insist it isn't their fault. They lie, and say that the law required them to take certain actions that it didn't. You can argue that the old Washington tradition of cabinet secretaries falling on their swords for the boss after a massive mistake was cynical, or not genuine accountability. But I think the simulation of accountability was better than the current situation of absolutely no accountability. Imagine how differently Obama would be perceived if at any point during the past five years, we heard… "Mr. President, I understand it is absolutely unacceptable that an agency under me was sending guns to Mexican drug cartels, including one used to kill an American border-patrol agent. My resignation letter is on your desk." "I'm sorry I have to accept this, Eric." … "Mr. President, on my watch, the Internal Revenue Service behaved in an out-of-control manner, unacceptably targeting Americans based upon their political beliefs, abusing its power and violating the trust the American people. My resignation letter is on your desk." "I'm sorry I have to accept this, Tim." … "Mr. President, by allowing Snowden in the door, and failing to keep an eye on him, we've allowed one of the biggest intelligence disasters in American history. My resignation letter is on your desk." "I'm sorry I have to accept this, Keith." … "Mr. President, my department made awful, inexcusable decisions about the security for our people in Benghazi. There's no excuse. My resignation letter is on your desk." "I accept your resignation, Hillary." But they did fire the guy who made fun of his co-workers on Twitter. The Hard Truths of Why Cuccinelli Is Losing Bad The Washington Post poll of Virginia back in May found Republican Ken Cuccinelli leading Democrat Terry McAuliffe, 46 percent to 41 percent. However when registered voters were asked, "As it stands now, how much do you know about Ken Cuccinelli and his qualifications to be governor?" 24 percent of respondents said, "nothing at all," and 29 percent said, "just a little." Another 35 percent said, "a fair amount" and 12 percent said, "a lot." Politicians are rarely as well-known or as well-liked as they think. Because most of the people they encounter know exactly who they are, and seek to ingratiate themselves or are seeking favors, they experience a small-scale version of the bubble that Richard Ben Cramer described in his campaign book, What It Takes: The White House is the thickest and shiniest bubble of all. It's not just that we can't see him. From the White House, he can't see anything outside. Why didn't [George H. W.] Bush get it? Well, the White House was running like a top! Everyone who walked into his office had a wonderful job — and were excited by the swell things they were doing for the country and its people. Every microphone over which he peered had a thousand faces upturned to his, ready to cheer his every applause line. If he left Washington, every tarmac on which Air Force One touched down had a line of prosperous people in suits, to pump Bush's hand and tell him things were, we were, he was . . . great! In May, about half of Virginians preferred Ken Cuccinelli, but they didn't know that much about him. Then McAuliffe's air campaign began. McAuliffe's domination of the television airwaves in Virginia started early and grew more lopsided in recent weeks: 
When McAullife launched his first attacks, there simply weren't enough Virginians who felt like they knew Cuccinelli well enough to reject them. Back in July, I interviewed Cuccinelli and asked him about how he would face the well-funded attacks from McAuliffe and the rest of the Democratic Party -- with national Democratic organizations largely conceding the New Jersey governor's race. His answer when I asked how he felt to have that kind of bulls-eye on his back: I've had that before in my three [state] senate races. I was the Democrats' number one target in 2002, number one target in 2003 and number two target in 2007, of all the legislative races running at that time. I've been in that position before. I've been outspent in all four races I've run before, and we won all four of them with a good grassroots commitment to our core principles and building a policy-focused campaign on top of that. And we're counting on doing that again. As [McAuliffe's Democratic primary rival from four years ago] Brian Moran said in 2009, 'we need a fighter, not a fundraiser.' I'm a fighter, he's a fundraiser. It gives me no pleasure to write this, but Cuccinelli's answer amounted to whistling past the graveyard. It turns out the lessons of state senate races and a statewide bid in a year when the top of the ticket is winning by a record margin aren't quite so applicable to the political and media environment of 2013. Now a look a bit down the ballot: According to a new Washington Post/Abt SRBI poll Monday, Republican Mark D. Obenshain and Democrat Mark R. Herring are in a near dead heat to become Virginia's top lawyer. Herring, a state senator from Loudoun County, has the support of 49 percent of respondents, while Obenshain, a senator from Harrisonburg, gets 46 percent. The race is within the poll's margin of error. Think of that down-ballot race as the "control group" in an experiment of how a $4 million or so advantage in television advertizing affects a race. After the GOP divide on the transportation tax, Governor Bob McDonnell's gift scandal, and the government shutdown (which probably hit Virginia harder than any other state), it's a not-so-great environment for Republicans -- one where a generic Republican candidate would be slightly trailing or even in an open seat race. But with the spending disparity in the governor's race, well . . . that turns it into a rout. Chris Matthews, Raging Conservative It only took a year, but Chris Matthews is now starting to ask the same questions about Benghazi that most of us on the right have been asking all along: JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Well, Hillary in her testimony before Congress said she was there, she was, you know, on the ground, in the State Department listening to the response in real time on the phone as it was happening, and so, she knew what was happening. But again, they also testified that there were waves of attacks, so they thought that, you know, after the first wave that things were quieting down. That's when they said, well, maybe we don't need to send help, and help was really far away. It wasn't like it was next door. It was several hours away in Italy, so -- MATTHEWS: But the fight went on for seven hours. NEWTON-SMALL: Yeah, but then if you're doing it in waves, you think the attack is over and sending somebody is not going to help anymore, right? Then all of a sudden, they attack again. MATTHEWS: I'm going to ask you something. If that was your brother or father in there, would you say that's an acceptable response? 'Oh, it's probably over by now, it's no good to send anybody.' Or would you say, 'I don't care if it's over or not, I'm going to collect the bodies if nothing else. I'm going to get there and show I cared.' That's what I'd do. NEWTON-SMALL: These are questions that Hillary will have to answer if she runs for president in 2016 -- MATTHEWS: And the president and the National Security Adviser and everybody sitting in that Situation Room. We had lots of coverage of people when we killed bin Laden, we had a lot of coverage of that. There's a lot of photographers around during that. How come this is shrouded in mystery? What I can't understand is all these months later we're still trying to figure out what happened. I just want to know, as an American, what happened? Did everybody do what they were supposed to do? Did everybody make a really good desperate effort to save the lives of our people over there or didn't they? If they didn't, that's a problem, but I want an answer. The Depression of the Netroots, Continued Do you feel like the Obama years have been a series of relentless victories for liberalism? Ironically, some liberals don't, and in fact are calculating that their movement has forgotten its original goals and devoted itself to protecting their guy, regardless of actual policies. Ian Welsh: After 2008 everyone knew that they didn't need prog-bloggers and that they didn't really need to fear bloggers. (They may be annoyed by "Firebaggers", they do not fear them.) Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don't really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate's skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate's policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing. So progressives have no power, because they have no principles: they cannot be expected to actually vote for the most progressive candidate, to successfully primary candidates, to care about policy first and identity second, to not take scraps from the table and sell out other progressive's interests. The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don't like how you've been voting, and they'll probably win that primary. They are feared. Progressives are not feared, because they do not believe enough in their ostensible principles to act on them in an effective fashion. Jerome Armstrong, one of the first liberal bloggers and a guy who's easy to mock for his past astrology passions, but who seems to have a discerning mind in his head, sounds like a man deeply dissatisfied with what modern Democrats and liberal bloggers have become: The oomph of the Democratic party in the blogosphere today can be summed up with a cursory glance at posts and comments on Balloon Juice, Little Green Footballs and Booman Tribune. They bend over backwards to justify the party bailing out banks, the nation going deeper into debt with global military expansion, and spying on citizens, yet they'll nitpick that a libertarian is willing to allow abortion to be a state issue. They are more concerned with attacking truth-tellers like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden than they are keeping anyone accountable or demanding transparency. That's what they are really good at– justifying why the powerful should stay so and attacking the ones who challenge power. And, if needed, providing a handy social lifestyle issue to keep the division. There's no energy left. Nothing that inspires people that are pissed off and want change. Just finger-pointing at the other team. It's become pointless and principle-less tribalism. On paper, there are policy areas where a large chunk of the Right could ally themselves with the progressives -- fighting crony capitalists, corporate welfare, expensive bailouts, and other areas in which politicians who claim to support the free market are in fact actually in favor of helping the biggest and best-connected companies. Maybe as Obama's second term progresses, these folks will be receptive to a new push on this front . . . ADDENDUM: 
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