Weigel

Obama’s 2012 Campaign Tech Guru Throws up Hands at “Healthcare.gov Fiasco”

A good source of cheap Twitter fun over the past few weeks: the Twitter stream of Obama campaign tech veterans. They are reading the stories about healthcare.gov. They are hearing the punditry that can be boiled down to “Obama’s campaign worked, why can’t his health care site”? They are rich with lulz. Harper Reed has retweeted scores of jokes about how he, personally, should fix everything.

He’s also mocked the GOP for not grokking Web development.

Tim Murphy has spun off this feedback and talked to other Obama for America veterans, coming back with an ominous story about how healthcare.gov is by nature a google times more complex than a start-from-scratch campaign site. One veteran tells him that the odds of success for a project that wrangles “hundreds of different health insurance providers and dozens of state databases” were “in the single digits.” It’s also refreshing to hear someone point out that “Obama hires old campaign team for lucrative health care contract” would have been a scandal all its own.

Lee did not comment for Murphy’s story. His advice for a healthcare.gov fix is limited to a small series of tweets, sent apparently before he went to Rome for a conference.