One of the excuses for the technical incompetence of ObamaCare is that the president and his team were the victims of "sabotage" by congressional Republicans. Todd Purdum, a leftist longtime New York Times reporter, put forward this claim in a Politico op-ed last week, and yesterday the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, perhaps Obama's most effusive male admirer, echoed it, citing a deeply reported story by his Post colleagues Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin.

The idea that Republicans have "sabotaged" ObamaCare is ludicrous on its face. Sabotage entails destroying or damaging something by subverting it--by stealthily undermining it from within. Republican opposition to ObamaCare has been neither stealthy nor "within." Every Republican member of Congress has opposed ObamaCare consistently, openly and honorably.

But as the Goldstein-Eilperin piece demonstrates, there is some truth to the notion that Republican opposition has had a detrimental effect on ObamaCare's technical efforts, and there is some truth to the notion that those efforts were sabotaged. But the truth is more interesting than partisans like Purdum and Capehart are capable of seeing.

The Goldstein-Eilperin piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that "the project was hampered by the White House's political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law--sensitivity so intense that the president's aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition." Specifically:

In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services moved "the on-the-ground work of carrying out" from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's office to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS. "The move had a political rationale," Goldstein and Eilperin report. "Tucked within a large bureaucracy, some administration officials believed, the new Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would be better insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law."