White House aides race to make sure website is fixed as damage control ramps up

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR New York Times

President Obama was seething. Two weeks after the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov, Obama gathered his senior staff in the Oval Office for what one aide recalled as an "unsparing" dressing-down.

The public accepts that technology sometimes fails, the president said, but he had personally trumpeted that healthcare.gov would be ready on Oct. 1, and it wasn't.

"If I had known," Obama said, according to the aide, "we could have delayed the ­website."

Obama's anger — described by a White House that has repeatedly sought to show that the president was unaware of the extent of the website's problems — has lit a fire under the West Wing staff. Senior aides are racing to make sure the website is fixed by the end of the month as they confront the political fallout from presidential promises, now broken, that all Americans who liked their existing health care plans could keep them.

Inside the White House, there is anxiety that if the health care problems are not righted, they could imperil the rest of Obama's presidency, especially as criticism grows that the president misled consumers. Obama sought to tamp down that criticism by apologizing in an NBC interview on Thursday. "I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me," the president said.

Internally, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is in charge of damage control. He leads a health care conference call at 7 p.m. daily, just before a ­written update on the broken website is inserted into the briefing book that is delivered to his boss in the White House residence. McDonough is also the primary conduit to angry Democratic lawmakers who are seeking to delay parts of the law and extend the enrollment period until the problems are fixed.

So daily "check-in" sessions on the push for an immigration overhaul still happen every morning. There are regular West Wing meetings on transportation, college affordability and a new farm bill. Obama spoke about increasing exports in a speech at the Port of New Orleans on Friday, and he is planning a trip next week to talk about the economy.

"People expect us to fix the damn website," a senior White House adviser said. "But they want us to move on, and stay focused on improving the economy."

Some Democrats, however, think the administration is not sufficiently panicked and urgently needs to step up its response. They say the president and his staff do not recognize the full threat to his legacy, and they worry that Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, is not equipped to pull the administration out of the morass.

"They are going to have to start thinking about some options," said one Obama ally familiar with internal White House operations. "They need to get ahead of it somehow."