Obama: Your Call is Important to Us (+video)

By Carrie Budoff Brown.

President Barack Obama delivered an Obamacare speech Monday that sounded a lot like hold music.

With a staunch defense of the law and a hint of outrage over its problems, Obama sought to buy time with Congress, potential customers and the public while his administration rushes to fix HealthCare.gov, the beleaguered website that threatens the viability of his signature domestic achievement.

But as congressional oversight committees circle, he has to hope that improvements to the website ramp up more quickly than do the calls for suspending or delaying enrollment.

“There’s no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden. “People have been getting stuck during the application process. And I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am. Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth, so I want people to be able to get this great product.

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Photo Credit: APDems caught in Obamacare uproar

By Jonathan Allen and Jennifer Haberkorn.

It’s not the GOP that President Barack Obama has to worry about in defending his botched health care rollout, it’s fellow Democrats.

They voted for the law, sang its praises for three-plus years and still believe in the promise of health care reform. But now they face a conundrum: stay in lock step with Obama and risk their credibility as advocates for the law’s benefits or publicly criticize the administration for its recent problems — especially a failure to more quickly acknowledge, and rectify, the major malfunction of its Internet marketplace.

It’s a particularly vexing question for Democrats worried about their party’s chances in the 2014 midterm elections, and, increasingly, they’re opting for the latter strategy.

“What has happened is unacceptable in terms of the glitches,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They were overwhelmed to begin with. There is much that needs to be done to correct the situation.” It was the second time in a week that Pelosi had gone public with her dismay over the implementation of a law that she carried to enactment by winning tough votes on the House floor in 2009 and ’10.

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