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Borger: Obama's ultimate irony
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Gloria Borger says President Barack Obama has been a believer in high-tech government She says the Obamacare website woes and NSA spy practices have to shake his faith Borger: Shouldn't White House have taken control of the signature health care initiative? President may now be among 80% of Americans with little faith in government, she says 
Gloria Borger
(CNN) -- Irony is a part of life, the cliché goes. And right now, President Barack Obama is living the part, in a big way: He's the civil libertarian defending an activist drone program. He's the liberal with a spy agency caught eavesdropping on the private conversations of friendly leaders. And he's the high-tech health care reformer whose website got stuck at Go.
And so the ultimate irony may be this -- a President who extols the virtues of government has now been sucked into the big government vortex, experiencing (up close and personal, as they say) what it feels like to lose control to the bureaucrats. The ones who are afraid to deliver bad news, not to mention those who don't deliver the news at all. (As in, "the website crashed.") And the surveillance chiefs who, um, didn't initially volunteer that they're spying on the private phone lines of America's best friends.
Maybe the President needs to figure out some new communications tools to make himself clear. (As in, "Angela Merkel's cell is not just another data point.")
Gloria Borger Obama, we're told, is frustrated and angered by the pathetic rollout of his signature legislative achievement. He's also clearly re-examining how the National Security Agency decides to target friendly leaders, what we get from it and why we need it at all.
A couple of ex-intelligence officials tell me they're not shocked gambling was going on in Casablanca. ("Our job is to know things," says one.) Whether the President should have known about the monitoring of these specific heads of state is another matter entirely -- and best left to intelligence aficionados. I've asked -- and gotten answers on both sides of the argument.
But here are the larger questions that play into both the website fiasco and the NSA issues: How can a President take control of his own government? How can he make sure he knows what he needs to know? And as the pro-government cheerleader, doesn't he have a special responsibility to make sure it delivers, especially when his legacy hangs in the balance?
The problem is it's never easy to untangle a bureaucratic mess. "So you're the President, you're angry and you want to know how all of this happened," says a former senior administration official. "And the truth is, even you may not be able to figure it out. You just won't have enough time left in office."
Stunning as that sounds, it's probably accurate. Presidents are often isolated, and always the first among equals. So it seems to me that especially in the White House one of the principal jobs of an executive is to understand the incentive subordinates have to conceal information selectively.
People may report facts and then spin them. Bad news is not a good thing to deliver to presidents. Some are protective of the office and the President; giving the President plausible deniability of any problem is often the easiest and safest route. Or, as one former White House hand told me, "People just don't want to upset the boss, or get him blamed for anything."
All of which a President should know going into the Oval Office. If the reason the President did not know about the epic website issues is because the problems were hidden from the ground up, how about this solution: Establish an atmosphere, at all levels, in which truth telling is rewarded, not punished.
If Obama was surprised at the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, then on some level he failed one of the principal tests: Get the truth out of people, even if they know you are not going to like it.
Yes, this is government and humans are humans. But Obamacare has been the signature legislative achievement of this presidency. Everyone knew how complex this would be to get going, at every level.
So here's a question: Why wasn't the A-team led out of the White House, with a daily update to the president? Obama the campaigner was incomparably good at establishing metrics and using information technology to assess the extent to which those metrics were being hit. What happened here?
What seems to have happened was what often happens: The work got delegated to the bureaucrats somewhere else -- HHS? CMS? -- and, as a result, it got bogged down, delayed and muddled. Mistakes went either hidden or unrecognized. If folks down the food chain knew, they were keeping it from their bosses. After all, no reward in telling the truth.
The big question now is whether these problems are evidence of a huge management failure. "One of the things you find after working in government is that, under tremendous pressure, organizations that are supposed to produce accurate information, often don't," says a former senior administration official (think Benghazi). "And you can only rely on what people are telling you."
Or not telling you, as in the case of Merkel's cell phone. If the President and senior officials were not told about the wide range of the program, who thought that secrecy was a good idea?
Does a President have to play a game of Twenty Questions with his own people to figure things out? Or, conversely, as some intelligence officials claim, if the President did know something -- some giblet -- why not more? It's not as if Obama is a passive examiner of intelligence; quite the contrary. So what gives here?
Consider this: You're President Obama. You believe in the affirmative use of government. You're trying to govern a country that has lost confidence in the ability of that government to execute anything. And now you discover the website of your prized legislative achievement is a disaster. And the spies were tapping a good ally's cell phone, for no immediately obvious reason.
The final irony may be this: Four out of five Americans have little or no trust in their government to do anything right. And now Obama probably feels the same way.
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Canceled health plan is a good thing
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Sally Kohn: Conservatives feign shock that White House knew some plans would be canceled Kohn: It's because they don't meet Obamacare's higher bar of quality benefits If you lose your plan, she says, you'll have access to better and often cheaper plans Kohn: Most get insurance from jobs; millions who don't will get affordable plans 
Sally Kohn
Editor's note: Sally Kohn is a progressive activist, columnist and television commentator. Follow her on Twitter at @sallykohn.
(CNN) -- Conservatives are expressing shock and outrage that the Obama administration knew that many people in the individual insurance market would not be able to keep their plans once the Affordable Care Act took effect. Such shock is not surprising; overblown outrage is the stock and trade of conservative politics these days.
But here's what conservatives won't tell you, lest it undermine their theatrics: Many insurance plans are shutting down because they don't meet the higher bar of quality benefits required under Obamacare, and of those people who lose access to their plans, many will pay less and all will have better and more comprehensive options.
Also, with a few exceptions, no one is really noting that this point isn't quite news. In 2010, the fact that certain insurance plans would not be grandfathered into Obamacare because of their inadequate coverage was widely covered by the press. It was a given, after all that, if standards for health insurance were going to be raised in America -- a good thing -- then some plans that don't meet the bar would no longer be available. One could blame this on the Affordable Care Act, or alternatively, one could blame this on insurance companies for providing such substandard care in the first place.
Sally Kohn Here's what this boils down to:
Will some people lose their current insurance? Yes.
Will these same folks lose health insurance coverage? No.
They will all have access to better plans and in many cases pay less because of expanded options and tax credits.
This whole kerfuffle ignores that insurance plans were changing all the time and premiums were skyrocketing pre-Obamacare. Suddenly, a whole range of bad behavior on the part of insurance companies is blamed on the Affordable Care Act. It's just like employers trying to shaft their workers by cutting hours and benefits and blaming it on the Affordable Care Act, even though employer mandate provisions don't take effect for another year.
Trying to blame Obamacare for every problem in the private insurance market is paradoxical: The whole reason for passing the Affordable Care Act was to fix what's broken with private insurance
If we as a nation object to the inherent and deeper flaws within the private health insurance system in America, then we should embrace a single-payer system. But instead, because conservatives were so wed to propping up the private insurance market, we got Obamacare. It's disingenuous to turn around and point fingers at Obamacare for faults that have always been -- and will always be -- pervasive in private health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act prevents some of the worst abuses of the private insurance market and makes coverage overall more inclusive and affordable. It doesn't fundamentally alter the private market equation -- and incentives to cut corners and care.
I know Republicans love their manufactured outrage, as much as they loved it back in September 2010, when Republican Sen. Mike Enzi cited the same 40% to 67% numbers for those expected to lose plans that NBC now reports as "new news." But the fact remains that about 80% of Americans get their health insurance either from their employers or from a program like Medicare, and that won't change at all under the Affordable Care Act.
Millions more are uninsured and will be thrilled to have access to affordable insurance at subsidized rates. This saves us all money, because the cost of their emergency room care isn't offloaded onto the rest of us in rising premiums. What we're focused on now is the small sliver of Americans who, like myself, get insurance through the individual market. Some of us will see our current plans disappear, but all of us will see our plans upgraded -- with many becoming more affordable.
When it comes to President Obama and his policies, conservatives have a steady supply of manufactured shock. But improving the quality and affordability of health insurance for all Americans and providing real facts along the way, that's an important accomplishment.
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Cops: Mom sold 12 girls' virginity
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Mom accused of selling daughters' virginity - CNN.com Video