The website for purchasing health care has been an embarrassment.
The contradictions between Obama's promises about everyone being able to keep their existing coverage and the reality that millions of Americans would not be able to do so has raised memories of President George H.W. Bush's famous "Read My Lips" pledge.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has admitted that the enrollment numbers will fall well short of what was expected.
While it is true that the challenges facing the program have received much more attention than the successes, the problems are impossible to ignore.
There are many reasons for Obamacare's troubles
A large part of the problem was the underlying ideological outlook that shaped the original proposal.
The ACA was a product of a kind of half-baked liberalism that has been popular among many Democrats for several decades.
Since the 1990s, many Democrats have settled for jerry-built proposals that shy away from direct and aggressive federal intervention.
Many Democrats have concluded that in the current era, the only domestic programs that stand a chance of passing Congress are those that rely on the participation of market-based actors, limited federal funding and heavy federal-state collaboration in the administrative process.
Obama is now paying the price.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/11/opinion/zelizer-obamacare-liberalism/