President Obama made a true apples to oranges comparison yesterday when he tried to equate the failures of the Obamacare rollout to the glitches Apple experiences when it rolls out a new iOS.
“While we're here on insane people playing insane stuff, can we play the clip of the President comparing the glitches to Apple,” Glenn asked on radio this morning.
OBAMA: Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads -- or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.
“Nobody is rooting for failure,” Pat said angrily. “And secondly, Apple kind of has a track record. I don't know, a $400 billion company that sort of works. And the U.S. government has a record of the DMV and Postal Service. I mean it's a pretty bad track record. Oh, and public housing. Have you seen the beautiful splendor that is public housing? Come to New York and take a look at the great society.
Although the American people have witnessed the failure of government over and over again, most people remain hopelessly optimistic that things will somehow improve. We have witnessed failure, but very few people are actively rooting for it.
“You know what he's doing? Let's put this in perspective,” Glenn said. “He's not just comparing Apple to the rollout of Obamacare. He is also comparing himself to Steve Jobs. He's Steve Jobs.”
Pat pointed out that unlike President Obama, Jobs was known to put projects on hold that were not up to his standards. For example, the Mac program of the early 1980s was not rolled out late and over budget because Jobs refused to release something that was flawed.
“Does anybody really believe that if [Obama] could come up with a system that could beat the American healthcare system we had, is anybody [going to fault him]. No, no, no. I take this back. There's probably about 10% of the Republicans, maybe 20, that would never give him credit… They would be fools,” Glenn said. “If they could actually come up with a system that beat the healthcare system, but he would have to be such a genius.”
Given the number of failed socialized medicine experiments we have seen throughout history, President Obama and his team would have to be pretty brilliant to figure out a way to avoid the typical pitfalls of such a program.
“Let's put this into perspective, that he [and is team] are smarter than every communist country and every socialist country,” Glenn said. “He is somehow or another smarter than anyone who has ever run anything in Canada, anything in the Netherlands, anything in England, Cuba, China, Russia, anybody North Korea, South Korea. And [he has] assembled a team so smart, they can't even explain it to the American people. They can't even make the first step of sign up smooth. Hello!”
“I tend to root against things that are bad for the country and tend to root for things that are good for the country,” Stu added. “But I got news for you, my rooting interest in this has nothing to do with the failure of your product. Whether I root for it or against it has nothing to do with your poor design of the program that you have had four years to get prepared for.”
Perhaps the largest problem with the President’s comparison, however, is his failure to remember that Apple is a private company with shareholders and customers who can take their business elsewhere, if/when they are unhappy with a product. Obamacare, on the other hand, is a law of the federal government that Americans are forced to abide by.
“Steve Jobs, if he was so clueless that he took an iPad or iPod and said, ‘release it’ and the architect of it and came out and said, This thing is a train wreck. This thing is going to bankrupt the company… As a shareholder, I would root against Steve Jobs. In fact… I would give it just a few days and I would sell my stock,” Glenn concluded. “But in this scenario, we can't sell our stock. We're trapped. See, Mr. President, what you have failed to realize is, you are not destroying Apple. You are destroying lives because we can't opt out. You made that very clear. We're illegal, if we don't have it at birth now. So, we can't sell our shares.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP
