Hey, Look! A Hard-Hitting Television Ad That Works!

Today on NRO

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Democrats control just a third of state legislatures. Why do they hold more than half the Senate? Against Grand Bargains.

JONATHAN STRONG: House Republicans give Boehner a standing ovation. The Last Conference.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Practical issues about governance and municipal services trump race in the Motor City's mayoral race. Detroit's Race Without Race.

DEROY MURDOCK: Behind in the polls, Joe Lhota might as well embrace reformist, free-market ideas. Lhota Should Run Bold.

MICHAEL J. PETRILLI: Diane Ravitch's new book is flawed. Rain of Errors.

SLIDESHOW: Place Hackers.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

October 17, 2013

I realize I've been a gloomy Gus lately -- pointing out that Cuccinelli's nearly doomed because he got outspent early, that the GOP's shutdown strategy completely mistook Obama's incentives, that not every non-essential government employee is a useless bureaucrat, and that the tea-party House Republicans bet it all on their ability to get Senate Democrats and President Obama to flinch and concede, an ability that they simply didn't have.

So to make up for the BladeRunner-meets-Chinatown-meets-Old Yeller tone of recent weeks, I present the all-conservative, no-RINO edition of the Morning Jolt:

No, Really, the Obamacare Insurance Exchanges Are @#$%^&

Kevin Drum, writing over at Mother Jones, a reliably liberal, pro-Obamacare publication:

I've been corresponding with a friend about the problems with the federal Obamacare website, and I have to admit that I'm having second thoughts about my initial reaction. Back on October 2, it looked to me like the problems were serious, but nothing all that out of the ordinary for a big software project. My conclusion: "Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked.

The reporting we've seen recently about the nature of the Obamacare problems certainly suggests otherwise. The bugs seem deep and profound. So why has this turned out to be so much worse than I thought it would be?

Because you have way too much faith in the good intentions and competence of Obama administration officials. Moving along . . .

With Obamacare, however, they weren't allowed to slip the schedule. They had to ship on October 1. Period. And so now I find myself thinking back to some of those difficult projects. What would have happened if instead of slipping the schedule, I had been forced to ship on the original release date? Answer: the software flatly wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't just have been bad, it would have been an existential catastrophe. And it would have taken many months to fix, not many weeks.

So perhaps that's where we are with the Obamacare site. I hope not, but it's sure starting to look that way. And if things really are this bad, I really, really hope there a Plan B. Beefed up phone banks. Paper and pencil. Something.

Relax, Kevin! Of course they have a backup plan! What kind of idiots wouldn't have a backup plan for their glitchy, held-together-with-spit-and-bailing-wire, powered-by-a-gerbil-wheel website? Secretary Sebelius, tell Kevin about the backup plan!

The Health and Human Services Department will meet its central ObamaCare deadline and does not need a backup plan for delays, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday.

Ruh-roh, Shaggy!

Meanwhile, finding people who actually have successfully signed up for Obamacare is like finding Waldo.

The one who successfully signed up online is wearing a striped shirt. No, not that one.

In Florida:

Will the Floridians who have enrolled for Obamacare please stand up?

Nearly two weeks after the federal government launched the online Health Insurance Marketplace at HealthCare.gov, individuals who have successfully used the choked-up website to enroll for a subsidized health insurance plan have reached a status akin to urban legend: Everyone has heard of them, but very few people have actually met one.

The Miami Herald searched high and low for individuals who completed enrollment for a subsidized health plan through the marketplace, also called an exchange, launched by the federal government on Oct. 1 in 36 states, including Florida.

Okay, how about up in New England? "Vermont has had 631 people sign up for insurance through its state-run Obamacare exchange as of Tuesday morning."

Okay, how about Delaware? "According to a Washington Post report Wednesday morning, 59-year-old Janice Baker officially became the first confirmed enrollee in the Delaware Obamacare exchange that opened."

Okay, how about Wisconsin? "A Wisconsin Reporter review of the insurers in Wisconsin's federally controlled Health Insurance Marketplace seems to confirm what the state Office of the Commissioner of Insurance told the MacIver News Service earlier this week: There has been 'minimal participation' in the exchange to date. OCI estimated the number of people signed up was fewer than 50."

Okay, how about Hawaii?

Officials claim that HawaiiHealthConnector.com, the online Obamacare exchange designed to provide individuals and small businesses with information about health care plans, federal subsidies and tax credits, is now fully operational. But that wasn't the case yesterday for some who tried to log on.

The website went live Oct. 1 after a great deal of media hype, but for two weeks, the exchange had no information on the 95 health insurance plans it would eventually offer, including pricing.

Some individuals and businesses contacted insurance companies directly, and were issued the same plans, but they couldn't apply for the tax credits or federal subsidies by not going through the exchange.

Coral Andrews, executive director of the Hawaii Health Connector, said the exchange's website was fully operational as of 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

But while some consumers were able to view the information on plans and pricing, others continued to receive an error message that read: "This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later" or were greeted by a blank page.

It's not absolutely disastrous everywhere, but it's not good anywhere, either: "CNN found that 20,994 people had enrolled in and paid for Obamacare in the 14 state-run exchanges and the District of Columbia."

The Atlantic calculates "at least 115,000 people" have completed applications -- but some of those folks still have to pick out a plan and begin paying for it.

Obama administration's prediction by October 31: 494,620. Goal in the first year: 7 million.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, "Over 47 million nonelderly Americans were uninsured in 2012."

For What It's Worth, Lefties Think We Move the Goalposts Our Way a Lot

Peter Beinart argues that conservatives are actually winning:

It's not just that Obama looks likely to accept the sequester cuts as the basis for future budget negotiations. It's that while he's been trying to reopen the government and prevent a debt default, his chances of passing any significant progressive legislation have receded. Despite overwhelming public support, gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama's second term agenda, looks unlikely. And the other items Obama trumpeted in this year's state of the union address—climate change legislation, infrastructure investment, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost to the minimum wage—have been largely forgotten.

Democrats keep holding out hope that losing yet more public support will break the ideological "fever" that grips the Republican Party and help GOP moderates regain power. The problem, as the last few weeks have shown, is that the GOP keeps defining moderation down. For instance, the Washington GOP's plummeting approval ratings may well boost the presidential prospects of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, just as the Gingrich Congress paved the way for the comparatively moderate George W. Bush. Like Bush, Christie is described as moderate because he has Democratic allies in his home state and because his rhetoric is not as harsh on cultural issues. But in the White House, Bush's economic policies were hardly moderate. To the contrary, from taxes to social security to regulation, he governed well to the right of Ronald Reagan. Christie likely would as well. As governor, after all, he's vetoed a hike in the minimum wage, cut the earned income tax credit, vetoed a millionaires' tax three times and adopted basically the same attitude towards public sector unions as Wisconsin's Scott Walker.

Yet for the next three years, the press will likely describe Christie as "moderate" for the same reason it now describes a "clean" CR as Republican surrender: Because the GOP keeps moving the ideological goalposts and the press keeps playing along.

Hey, Look! A Hard-Hitting Television Ad That Works!

Matt Mackowiak of Potomac Strategy Group, writes in with some focus group research on one of their latest ads, a particularly hard-hitting one tying Terry McAuliffe to a "Gang of Five" who want to "Detroit" the state of Virginia.

We ran a focus group, conducted by nationally-respected McLaughlin and Associates, to test the effectiveness of our "Don't Let Them Detroit Virginia" ad, which you exclusively reported a few weeks back.

Here's the ad, which has now been viewed over 20,000 times on YouTube alone.

Here's a short summary of ballot movement after viewing:

GOP voters: +8
Dem voters: +4
Independents: +2
Women: +4 (McAuliffe loses 4)
Men: +5
Over 40: +6
Overall ballot: +5

The question is, will casual, channel-flipping viewers give it the attention that folks in a focus group will?

Nothing Beats a Good Dressing Down of a Spiteful Federal Manager

Representative Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, tearing a new . . . you-know-what to the National Park Service:

During a U.S. House hearing concerning the closure of national parks and monuments during the partial government shutdown, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) scolded the director of the National Park Service for treating "pot-smoking" demonstrators in the Occupy movement with more respect than the nation's war veterans.

Gowdy relentlessly challenged National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis to cite the federal regulation that prompted his department to put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. He also pointed out that the Park Service failed to issue a single citation when Occupiers camped out at D.C.'s McPherson Square for 100 days — 100 days in "non-compliance" with federal regulations.

"That was two years ago," Jarvis explained.

"Well, I can cite you the regulation that you did not follow two years ago. Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?" Gowdy pressed.

The Republican congressman repeatedly asked for a straight answer as to why Jarvis ignored a federal regulation for 100 straight days when dealing with protesters, but erected barricades on the first day of the government shutdown.

"On the very first day of the closure, I implemented a closure order for all 401 national parks in compliance with the Anti-Deficiency Act," Jarvis replied. "And immediately, that day, also included, as a part of that order, that First Amendment activities would be permitted on the National Mall." …

Jarvis then claimed that the veterans would have been permitted to enter the war memorials if they "declared" they were exercising their First Amendment rights.

"Who were they to declare it to? A barricade?" Gowdy responded sarcastically. "Mr. Chairman, I want the record to reflect that no statute or code of the federal regulation was cited to justify the erection of barricades."

ADDENDUM: Ah, the perfect ending to the government shutdown: "In a bizarre end to the House vote to reopen the federal government late Wednesday night, a stenographer was escorted off the House floor after yelling into a microphone about God, Freemasons and a divided government, aides and members said."

Just think, of all the people who work for the U.S. government, she avoided furlough!

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