Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

I understand you've had a rough couple of weeks. First you had to deal with an insane government shutdown and near debt-default. And now the rollout of your signature achievement- Healthcare reform- has been a total disaster. Here's the thing- I like you, and I voted for you. But I don't feel sorry for you. You deserve every ounce of the misery and failure that you are now immersed in. I feel just as obligated to defend your botched healthcare roll out as you felt obligated to listen to our pleadings for a public option/single payer. You sewed the seeds of your own destruction, because you didn't want to make the difficult, just, policy choices when the opportunity was presented to you. You, and your supporters, are now paying dearly for your prior lack of conviction. To make matters worse, this train wreck is severely undermining the American people's already low confidence in the ability of government to properly serve the public interest. While you may be able to dye over all the gray hairs and wrinkles that these days have caused you, you will never be able to undo the trauma that this nation has endured since November 2010.

The failure of the Healthcare.gov website is entirely due to the policy choices you made back in 2009. Instead of adopting a fair, cheap, and simple Medicare-for-All like the majority of your supporters wanted, you opted for an expensive, hideously complicated, pro-corporate Rube-Goldberg machine because you opened the White House doors to industry lobbyists and didn't want to scare the Big Money. When it came to criminally prosecuting the perpetual fraud machine of Wall Street that cost the global economy tens of trillions, you urge us not to be so vindictive and "look forward, not back". Instead of focusing like a laser on the depressed economy, you passed through a weak stimulus, wiped your hands of responsibility for the macro-economy, and proceed to push through your status-quo healthcare bill that no one wanted, and few could understand. Your website is now a disaster, precisely because you lacked the courage to do what was right for the nation. Just as the ACA's drafters stretched and strained to make marginal improvements to an archaic and hopelessly broken healthcare system, Healthcare.gov's computer coders are stretching and straining to fulfill the nearly impossible bureaucratic tasks that your "reforms" have demanded of them. 

The insane Republican right has a lot do with these problems, sure. But you must realize that you inflamed and empowered them. This loudly dying party is now angry, racist and vile, but there is nothing you can do about that.  The way your enemies behave is out of your control. When you took office in January of 2009, the Republican party was in shambles. They were at their weakest point in a generation, and you had a golden opportunity to make them permanently irrelevant. Instead of driving a stake through the Republican Party's cruel gray heart, you breathed new life into the elephant's corpse by taking your eye off the economic ball, and opting for the status quo option of a conservative and legally dubious individual mandate.

Thankfully though, it appears you have finally gotten over the inane naivete of your 2004 convention speech, where you pretended, in front of a crowd of fawning loser liberals, that the vast political differences of this country simply didn't exist. Only declaring "there are no red states or blue states" does not make it so. Words alone do not have that power. When Lincoln read his Emancipation Proclamation, he did not simply declare slavery to be over; instead he fought to make it so, by rallying his nation around the bloody but righteous cause of the civil war. You must realize that you are now facing the same political/economic forces, propaganda strategies, ingrained racial animus, and oligarchic genetic codes that Mr. Lincoln faced nearly 150 years ago. The United States is once again fighting a civil war, (thankfully without guns), and the stakes this time are also very grave.  In the face of unprecedented foreign competition, our union, divided, cannot much longer stand.

But because you abandoned your supporters and scared the moderates with this complicated bill, you stirred up this mad right wing in a year ending with a zero. The disastrous midterm loss that you brought upon yourself and your party has killed the progressive agenda until 2014 at least, and likely until 2020. Your website is not the only thing putting the American people on hold! Making the real reforms to save our economy and our planet have now been put on hold indefinitely.  Eventually, if you haven't already, you need to ask yourself if your complicated and inadequate health care bill was worth sacrificing 10 years of progress: 10 years that this fracturing nation probably cannot afford.

Mr. President, you are without a doubt an honest and upright family man. I hope, and predict, that this botched rollout will be a minor historical footnote in the broader effort of expanding health insurance coverage. You don't deserve half of the criticism leveled at you, but you have made some grave errors. My hope is that you can own up to these mistakes, and use the lessons learned to inform your decision making going forward.

As you would say in your native tongue: As-salam alaykum (kidding)