Former national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Tuesday that the Obama administration misjudged how tough it would be to pass Obamacare, and how the proposal would deepen the political divide between Republicans and Democrats.
“We certainly misjudged how difficult the ACA would be,” he said on CSPAN, referring to the law by its legislative name, the Affordable Care Act.
“I think the feeling was that this will be a few month process,” Rhodes said. “Frankly, it ended up dragging on for almost a full year, and just consumed the political debate.”
He said Obama’s team also didn’t see how the bill, which would go on to pass without any Republican votes and with little GOP input, would split the two parties even further.
“We at a minimum definitely underestimated the opposition that it would engender, the time that it would take,” Rhodes said. “There’s certain priorities we didn’t get to those first two years that we still hear about from certain constituency groups that I’m sympathetic to like immigration reform.”
“I think maybe what we did is we misjudged the difficulty of just getting that through,” he added. “We had trouble holding even Democrats. Joe Lieberman, for instance, kind of cast a deciding vote against a concept of having a public option in the ACA. That extended things by several months.”
“I think we’re guilty of misjudging the time that would take and the acrimony it would evoke.”
