The effect, ultimately — and the danger for any administration — is to be an object of ridicule.
Look, this whole discussion has had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality from the very beginning. You can’t measure saved jobs. Arguing over the precision or imprecision of the numbers, which are fictional at the beginning, is like arguing that there are twelve angels on the head of a pin and only ten …
And when you hear these reports, as we’re hearing now with the fictional congressional districts, the risk for the administration is that it becomes an object of ridicule. And once that happens, it’s hard to actually stop.
And the issue will become competence. There have been ideological objections against this administration — it’s left-wing, it’s radical, and all that. But now we’re starting a new kind of meme, that it is an administration that really can’t get things done.
→Charles Krauthammer on the Obama administration’s phony jobs claim and fictional congressional districts
