Magic of presidential apologies

Gail Collins

Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013 | 2 a.m.

President Barack Obama’s loyal supporters are heavy of heart. Perhaps their chief source of comfort is that the Obamacare mess hit the headlines at about the same time as the crack-smoking mayor of Toronto. At least the president didn’t claim he was drunk when he wrote the health care bill.

Obama, obviously not a guy who enjoys self-abasement, has been on an apology tour. He sat down with NBC News and said he was sorry that people whose health insurance plans were canceled “are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me.”

While far from emotionally satisfying, this did rise a tad above the classic blame-the-victim apology. (See football player Richie Incognito on his racist phone call to a black teammate: “... I’d apologize to his family. They took it as malicious. I never meant it that way.”)

The chaos surrounding the rollout of health care reform is a terrible blow to people who’ve been standing behind the president through thin and thin. They had already come to grips with the fact that the guy who once taught constitutional law wasn’t going to protect their privacy from government snoops. That their old peace candidate really loved the idea of shooting people down with drones. That he was probably never going to be able to deliver on serious immigration reform, gun control or even expanded preschool.

But there was still affordable health care, a goal that had been eluding presidents since Teddy Roosevelt, which had required so many breathtaking leaps of political faith to pass and protect. One achievement so big it was pretty much enough.

And then the website didn’t work and long-standing promises were broken and the whole thing was turning into a joke on the Country Music Association Awards.

“I think it’s fair to say that the rollout has been rough so far,” the president said at the start of his news conference last week.

I think it’s fair to say that is an understatement.

Obama also acknowledged that when Americans had problems with the website, “that’s on us, not on them.” Later, when he began taking questions from reporters and got into full-throttle apology mode, he offered up six versions of “That’s on us,” along with more wordy variations. (“Ultimately, I’m the president of the United States and they expect me to do something about it.”)

Taking responsibility is extremely popular in these circumstances. It makes you appear to be strong while stating the obvious. If all of Washington had not been eaten by zombies at the beginning of the movie “World War Z,” the president could easily have gone on TV and told the nation: “Undead mutants are flooding the planet. Our troops are hitting them with everything we’ve got, but they’re still coming. In the end, that’s on me.”

The public is so inured to responsibility-taking by executives under fire that it’s little more than a polite reflex, like “thank you for your service.” George W. Bush took responsibility for the Katrina foul-ups, for heaven’s sake.

Presidents have generally been bad about apologies. See: Richard Nixon resigning. (“I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation.”) Bill Clinton was more forthcoming when he apologized for lying about Monica Lewinsky. (“I misled people, including even my wife.”) But he had a little help from a grand jury.

Bush still hasn’t said he’s sorry for getting us into Iraq, although, in his book “Decision Points,” W. did express deep, deep regret that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, because it threw a shadow over what he still sees as a really excellent undertaking.

(Second point of comfort on the Obamacare rollout: not as bad as the war in Iraq.)

We haven’t seen a whole lot of truly satisfying apologies on a high level; it’s been more than half a century since a British official who lied about an adulterous fling showed how sorry he was by going off to clean toilets for the poor. The best we can generally hope for is a specific explanation of how the politician in question screwed up and how he’s going to make it right.

At his news conference, the president noted — kind of bragged, really — that the Obama campaign had been spot-on when it came to information technology. Then he complained that the way the federal government purchases IT “is cumbersome, complicated and outdated.”

Since he already knew “that the federal government has not been good at this stuff in the past,” Obama continued, his crack advisers should have prepared to go around that problem “two years ago” when planning for the rollout began.

Yes!

“... But that doesn’t help us now. We’ve got to move forward.”

Sigh.

Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times.