Are you shocked?

The estimable Walter Russell Mead claims to be shocked at what the Leader of the Free World revealed last week:

The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. 

This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut.

Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing. 

Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.

And with all this, neither he nor, apparently, anyone in his close circle of aides and advisors knew that the website was a disaster. Vapid, blind, idly flapping their lips; they pushed paper, attended meetings and edited memos as the roof came crashing down. It is one thing to fail; it is much, much worse not to see failure coming. There is no way to construe this as anything but a world class flop.

I'm not shocked at all. A few reasons:

• For the entirety of his presidency, Barack Obama has been able to count on a compliant media that would bail his presidential tuchus out of any number of issues. Candy Crowley turned on a dime from a debate moderator to a Praetorian Guard when it appeared that Mitt Romney might score a point on Benghazi. They weren't going to ask any hard questions, right? Why would you believe that it would happen, if it had never happened before? The press conference was surreal because it had nothing to do with any experience that the Leader of the Free World had ever had before in the first five years of his presidency.
• There's an old saying about leadership: good leaders aren't afraid to have strong people around them. Poor leaders don't like to be challenged. Chicago politicians are used to getting their way and demanding loyalty first, second and last. The Leader of the Free World is a Chicago politician.
• People who need to know have long since taken the measure of the Leader of the Free World. Why do you suppose that Vladimir Putin rag-dolls Obama every chance he can? Why do you suppose that Bashar Assad is getting by with doing a victory dance over the "red line." It's not complicated -- they both knew they could get by with it. And they have. While Chicago politicians are routinely ruthless toward underlings and those who would nip at their heels, they don't mess with people who have an independent power base. Assad doesn't have a patronage job.

Back to Mead:

What is a staff for? Surely a competent staff would have set up an effective monitoring and reporting system so that accurate and timely information about website problems would reach the White House. Surely at the first signs of trouble, an effective trouble-shooting response from the White House would delve into the issues, develop some action plans, and also inform the President and senior staff about any threat to the scheduled rollout. But apparently none of this happened, and at least from what we see so far in public, the President is OK with that. No heads are rolling. No one is being taken to the White House woodshed. There are reports that the President has vented, but “no drama Obama” is apparently still turning the other cheek. The President is content to keep working with the team he’s got.

I'm pretty sure that Mead, one of the most astute commenters around, knows better. They had to know what was happening. The heads of marionettes don't roll anyway; they might bounce once, but generally they flop in the breeze.

Once more to Mead:

Forget the merits and demerits of Obamacare. The White House now faces crises of confidence and competence and President Obama will not be able to solve one unless he addresses both. While much of the MSM is still doing its usual collusive best to avoid peering too deeply into the entrails of a liberal disaster (something already changing and likely to change more as liberal opinion continues to detach itself from a disappointing administration), some messes are too big to ignore. As more people reflect on the President’s extraordinary press conference, the public sense that the President and his team just aren’t up to the job will inevitably grow. It was a jaw dropping moment of naked self revelation, and the more one reflects on it the more striking it becomes. The President of the United States didn’t know that his major domestic priority wasn’t ready for prime time—and he thinks that sharing this news with us will somehow make it better. It is moments of this kind that give epithets like “Carteresque” their sting.

That's unfair to Jimmy Carter, of course. Carter's problem was that he tried to micromanage everything. Obama has only rarely given the appearance of caring about much of anything other than the blandishments of the office. If you hold on too tightly, or don't hold on at all, you end up in roughly the same place, but Carter at least seemed to care. The larger point has been obvious, for a very long time now. While Barack Obama is a hell of a salesman, he doesn't service what he sells.