Blog: Obama's Rose Garden phony numbers 'tell'

Blog: Obama's Rose Garden phony numbers 'tell':

The first part of the tell was the obvious outright lie told by the president in a “poor me” moment of self-pity. From the official transcript:

And we didn’t make a hard sell.  We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials like some critics did.  

Billions of dollars of commercials? Even if anyone believed the fairy tales about the Evil Koch Brothers, billions of dollars could not have been spent on anti-Obamacare commercials. That is the budget of an entire presidential campaign, planes, travel, and ubiquitous advertising, the whole nine yards.

The only advertising budget that even approaches that figure is the one spent by the federal and state governments promoting Obamacare. Last summer, theAssociated Press tallied up the Obamacare spending plans of the feds and the states, and came up with the figure of $684 million. So lavish a marketing budget covered embarrassments like the $1.7 million tedious Richard Simmons video promoting Covered California:

......and a variety of other tasteless, ludicrous, and insulting initiatives like the infamous Pajama Boy.

Even The New York Times reported that:

From January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare andMedicaid Services, which runs the HealthCare.gov site and administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media, officials said.

Not since New Coke has there been an advertising campaign so well-funded and so ineffective.