This is a fine piece by Margaret Wente at the Globe & Mail.
The whole essay is excellent, you have to read the whole thing.
"Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. It’s not just that he looks incompetent –
it’s that he looks deceitful. He told people they could keep their
plans, their doctors and their hospitals, and that their insurance
payments wouldn’t go up. That turns out not to be true for a lot of
people, who feel duped. If they’d known what Obamacare would really
mean, they wouldn’t have supported it. And the worst isn’t over."
"But Obamacare is much more than a test of a presidency. It’s a test of
whether big government can solve big problems. And so far, the answer is
very bad for the entire liberal enterprise."
"As venerable left-leaning pundit Thomas Edsall wrote
in The New York Times, “Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding
the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative
portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand
government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too
scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is
incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.”
"This is a cautionary
tale for Canada, where progressive politicians are fond of big ideas
that will fix (fill in social problem here). It should resonate
throughout Ontario, where the Liberal government’s two signature
policies – to transform energy and early education – have turned into
expensive failures. It should be studied very carefully by the two
progressive federal parties, who may find that voters are increasingly
skeptical of government promises to cure whatever ails us."
"The truth is that no matter how many smart people are in charge, governments can’t run things very well."