With this Gruber character (can we please stop calling him an "architect"?) running around extolling the lies he perpetrated on the "stupid" American populace in pursuit of his health insurance law, David French adds a little perspective.

Obamacare was so expansive, so unpopular, and so outside the perceived will of the voters, that Gruber and his administration allies felt that they had to intentionally confuse and deceive the American people to pass health care reform through a Democrat-dominated Congress. [. . .]

They knew that if they wrote a law in plain English that even their Democratic allies in Congress would reject it. They knew that if they explained the true effects of the law - including the existence of very real trade-offs - that not even a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate could save them. [. . .]

Mr. French goes on to note that a lot of smaller reforms could have been achieved in a bi-partisan fashion, because Republicans had just been squashed in the election and were looking for opportunities to compromise. But the President was far more ambitious:

(A)id for the poor and near-poor wasn't enough. It had to increase access to abortion. It had to turn employee health plans into the next front of the culture war. It had to give the IRS an even greater degree of access to Americans' private lives. It had to increase regulatory authority over myriad aspects of American health care. It had to engage in stealth redistribution of wealth.

While the truly partisan pundits are unfazed by Gruber's compulsive truth-telling, will the allegedly more mainstream media revise its own history of the Obama presidency? Is the problem with Obamacare truly Republican "obstructionism," or is it administration deception - featuring a willingness to deliberately make the provision of American health care needlessly complex to accomplish hyper-partisan ideological goals?

How bad was Obamacare? So bad it couldn't even pass through a Democratic supermajority on its own merits.