People who have experience with programs for the needy will recognize a familiar bureaucratic incompetence in the rollout. It's a tragedy to watch early efforts to sign up through a new government-mandated insurance access route—as by these working-class Floridians—turn into one more sad chapter in a long book called the humiliations and frustrations of not being well-off in America.

Yet the fact remains that there are uninsured who need health insurance, and they will need it whether or not it is easy to get. Most of these people are already inclined by demographics toward the Democrats, and as they come in contact with the effects of the Affordable Care Act, their views on it have become more positive, according to an October 16 memo from Democratic pollsters. "The biggest shifts on favorability since 2010 come not from partisans but from independents and key groups, including unmarried women, white non-college voters, and seniors. These are also the groups most likely to report that they are seeing the benefits of the law. This is not being driven by partisans aligning their views; this is being driven by the relevance of the changes to people’s lives," observe memo authors Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert.

The Obamacare rollout is sure to become a legendary case study in high-profile government goofs. But polls show people now oppose the law less than they did just this summer, too.

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Obamacare was damaged at the outset by the political tug-of-war over its very existence, and the conflicts at its creation have had serious downstream effects, placing the federal government in charge of far more than it was supposed to be doing. It also has also suffered from what Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steven Teles calls "kludgeocracy"—the tendency of interest groups, lobbyists, bureaucracy, and bad management to combine to create highly complex legislation and giant public-administration kludges, a term defined as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole."

That is what Obamacare is proving to be, though it has its bright spots, too among the 14 state exchanges. The law passed in March 2010, but final rules governing how the exchanges were to work were not issued until March 2013. A bid from the main IT contractor, CGI Federal, was accepted in September 2011, but the company did not start critical work until this spring because it was waiting for specifications from the government, leaving too little time to troubleshoot the enormously complex systems CGI and others were setting up.

The federal government needed to build many more sites than the program was designed for it to do. The law was set up to work state-by-state to respect existing state insurance markets. But Republican governors who opposed the idea of the exchanges and expanding Medicaid, coupled with a Supreme Court decision that they did not have to expand Medicaid, led the federal government to take on responsibility for many more states than it ever planned to do—36 in all. Deep and abiding problems with the federal procurement process meant expertise from Obama's close ties to new-media leaders could not be brought to bear on the project.