Because it wasn’t an issue. Obama now has 5 years experience as President- literally only two people alive today have more experience than he does. Does that mean you support him now? If not, it’s probably because his past managerial experience (or lack thereof) actually has very little to do with what kind of President he is.
It really wasn’t an issue. Obama and McCain each had pretty comparable levels of managerial experience; the former as director of a community project, and the latter as CO of a training squadron.
Health care, protection for workers, ending two wars, removal of WMDs in Syria, new nuclear treaty with Russia, equal rights for gays?
I love what we got as a result! 
Obama is experienced in:
-“peace”(he won a Nobel price for “Peace”
-reading speeches (from a teleprompter)
-“community organizing”(whatever that is)
-Law Reviews (he was a law Review expert at Harvard)
Other than that, he’s a pretty run of the mill Cook County politician
Seriously? Is this the sort of drivel that has people nodding their heads solemnly in conservative circles?
I don’t think Obama should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize either, but you don’t exactly campaign for it. Was Obama clearing his throat and pointing to himself in Geneva, or should this one maybe be considered the Nobel people’s fault?
And teleprompters? I seem to recall a few… no… EVERY other politician in history reading prepared speeches from prompters, notes and whatever. Don’t you have anyone around you who points and laughs when you say things like that?
There are real things to criticize about Obama. Why do you continue flogging this nonsense?
He’s also experienced in being President… only two people in the world exceed him on that count.
I noticed the NASDAQ website recently failed. Obviously, the Stock Market should be abolished.If they can’t even make a web site work, why should anyone invest their money? As a matter of fact, it brings into question the whole idea of “free markets.” Clearly, the technology isn’t ready yet.
Don’t make that stupid argument. We all know that technology fails sometimes. That is no excuse for a fail this expensive and this big. I work on IT systems just like this for a living and have years of experience in the past designing and working on systems almost exactly like what the Healthcare.gov is supposed to do. They also only cost a fraction of a percent of what this project cost no matter what the actual numbers are. Ours always worked with only minor flaws out of the gate they also included tens of millions of subscribers.
I can name actual companies and people including me who know how to design and implement such things down to the last piece of code. There is nothing new about it. This is a solved problem in the health insurance IT world and has been for years.
I agree with the OP and I have never been a strong Obama hater (not a huge supporter either). This is such basic mismanagement that I think it calls the entire Executive Branch organizational structure into question. They simply have no idea what they are doing and any middle-manager or above at any respectable company who delivered such a failed solution would be fired and never rehired at a respectable company again. Nobody has been fired over this one yet and that is telling because it means the big bosses don’t really know what to do either.
It isn’t like they are trying to build a Saturn V rocket to get to the moon. You expect the first few ones to have serious problems and a few of the early prototypes to blow up. It is more like the government is trying to build an airline and almost all the planes crash on takeoff. They respond buy saying that building an airline is difficult and that is true if you have no idea what you are doing yet millions of people take flights on commercial airlines everyday without incident.
If this is massive administrative mismanagement due to total incompetence, there should be no way for them to get such a massive fuck up corrected by the end of the month, right?
No, it is not possible from an IT or management perspective. The project is too fundamentally flawed from an architectural perspective for that because they were incompetent all around and it takes too long to reverse that. They may be able to throw a Hail Mary pass and come up with workarounds but it won’t work as originally designed. You can mark my words on that and we will talk again at the end of the month.
I had to deliver similar news to senior management at a very large company this week. The difference was that we prolonged the roll-out of the project and know what we are doing so that it will never affect anyone except the budgets for the management involved. It is irresponsible, suicidal, and completely unacceptable to deliver an end-product to consumers that is that badly flawed.
I know this is just ralph parroting something he heard somewhere and that there’s no actual thought behind it, but would someone want to briefly explain WTF this is supposed to mean, and how the current administration is somehow supposed to be emblematic of this?
Okay, let’s talk then. I wonder what you’re angling at with “workarounds” and “not as originally designed.”. Who gives a shit how it works if it works? I’m not going to care if your argument on Nov 30 is about style points.
There is no acceptable reason why the President of the United States cannot be at least as good of a manager as any talented middle-manger across respectable companies or even government organizations that exist all over the U.S. today.
That is not a partisan comment. The last good executive that served as POTUS was Bill Clinton. Bush Senior was also very good. George W Bush was horrible. Reagan was a great leader in popular conscience but had some extreme weaknesses. Carter was smart and had a good heart but was a terrible executive and leader. Ford was a placeholder based on circumstances and was pretty good at his job but there wasn’t any vision to be had. Nixon was a very good executive in theory but also not popular and plagued by scandal so he couldn’t do much except open up China. LBJ was an egomaniac with an agenda and did more harm than good. JFK was a horrible executive as well but he got killed early enough so that people glamorize him and his hot wife.
I agree with the OP. Obama is simply terrible as an executive and doesn’t deserve to have that position. He isn’t a bad person and has no scandals but he doesn’t have any idea about how to run large organizations because there is no way for him to. He was given it as an honorary, symbolic position and that type of thing has its place until there real decisions and work to be done. He is incredibly smart as a Constitutional scholar but that is much more relevant to a Supreme Court position than it is for the POTUS.
Slam is about the traditional corruption of Chicago politics. Stuff like how Mayor Daley delivered Illinois for Kennedy against Nixon because he was threatened by Meyer Lansky.
Nobody, but nobody, can “manage” the United States of America. The suggestion is absurd. We elect a President, not a regional logistics supervisor. He is elected to lead, not micromanage. Frankly, I doubt he can even code in BASIC. Don’t care.
Health care reform is a thing that had to happen, we’ve known it for years. And even this mangled mutant of progressive ideals and conservative stubborn resistance is a vast improvement of the rotten and inhumane system we have been under for generations!.
If the man who made his living creating new and improved ways to deny legitimate claims is going to be unemployed, I will find it hard to weep. There are many openings for baristas and bicycle messengers. Fresh air, exercise and/or lots of free coffee. The executives who encouraged and fostered that culture should count their blessings if they are downsized, they ought to have been horsewhipped through the streets. Greedy fucks without the slightest idea of responsible citizenship.
And in conclusion, the horse on in which they rode.
Well, people do give a shit. The workarounds are probably going to include opening emergency enrollment centers that are largely paper-based to actually get people enrolled. That type of thing would work just like if the next flight you take, the wheels fall off the plane on landing and you have to exit down the emergency evacuation chutes. True, everyone eventually gets to their destination without much carnage but that is simply not the way things are supposed to work. It is also very expensive (Outstanding job, unemployment goes down for two months!)
You can’t ignore this, they fucked up in a way that way that is unacceptable. Many people don’t have the tech knowledge and fall for the propaganda to understand the essential reply of ‘Well, could you have done better?’ is not a real argument. The answer for me is ‘Yes, I most certainly could and have’. Lots of other people could have because I know them and work them.
I have no idea what this implies for the entire Affordable Healthcare Act although I have have read much of it myself. I am agnostic on it right now. All I know is that they are down 21 - 0 in the first half with no coherent plan from here. However, it is completely clear that the overall management is lacking in ways that would not be tolerated in more competent contexts.
20+ years as a military dependent, and all I can say is one thing the military teaches officers is how to fuck up by the numbers. mrAru went on 2 freaking cruises above the arctic circle where the chop screwed up ordering and they were down to peanut butter when they stopped by a research station and effectively hijacked their supplies. He had one sub where most of the crew were cleared off under charges ranging from sexual abuse [an officer] to drug use and vending recreational pharmaceuticals to other crew members. He had a chief [some higher end enlisted with at least 15 years of experience, passing of tests in knowledge of their rate/profession and the approval of a committee and congress] known as Fast Flood Floyd because he decided to hit a button to see what it did. They had a commander get in trouble because they went to sea for every major holiday for almost a year because he was having issues with his wife and was trying to avoid her. While out making circles in the North Sea they got pinged by a soviet sub because the ood pulled a maneuver that caused the propellers to cavitate and make enough noise that they attracted soviet attention. Do I need to say more?
[And I am pretty certain that more happened that he couldn’t talk about at home.]
Ah, right. The guys who came up with New Coke, out on the street. The major executives of the major players in the financial meltdown, all standing beside highway ramps with signs saying “Will Play With Other Peoples Money for Food!”. Yeah. Right.
You have no idea what you are talking about yet again. This isn’t some minor project in a National Park somewhere. This is Obama’s pet project and legacy. He better damn well know what is going on at every level of it or he shouldn’t have taken it on in the first place. There was no mention of micro-managing. He doesn’t have to know how to code anymore than a General has to be able to more push-ups than the people in his command.
He does have to know how to manage other leaders and larger-scale projects. Most people fail to it as well at a small or medium-level scale. It is a real skill and something that I believe cannot be taught. Either you have it or you don’t and he doesn’t. That isn’t a criticism of his character. Most people do not have it but there is only one position for POTUS and that is an essential qualification for it.
You should not elect heads of the Executive Branch of the United States based on feel-good measures or symbolism. It is a pure executive job as hinted at by the name. Very large companies and the military find people that have those skills. We should expect the same at the very minimum.
Grover Cleveland. He only served one term as the 24th president of the United States