Charlie Cook: “Democrats and Obama-backers protest loudly when any comparisons are drawn between the debacle surrounding the launch and first impressions of the Affordable Care Act and President George W. Bush’s presidential nadir, Hurricane Katrina. Of course, there are big differences between the two presidential stumbles, but similarly, in each case, public confidence in that president was seriously eroded, and questions about the administrations’ core competence and honesty became highly prevalent.”

“How much resiliency Obama will have in the face of his current problems is obviously unknowable, and to a certain extent, will be dependent upon how fast the HealthCare.gov website is fixed and the extent to which other, more systemic problems are either resolved or addressed.”

“You want to prevent your race from being about Obamacare. If you enable your race to be about Obamacare, you’re making a mistake.”

— Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, quoted by National Journal.

National Journal: “For Democrats, the politics of the health care law are creating a death spiral of their own. For the White House to protect its signature initiative, it needs to maintain a Democratic Senate majority past 2015. But to do so, Majority Leader Harry Reid needs to insulate vulnerable battleground-state Democrats, who are all too eager to propose their own fixes to the law that may be politically satisfying, but could undermine the fundamentals of the law.”

“Race-by-race polling conducted over the last month has painted a grim picture of the difficult environment Senate Democrats are facing next year.”

Wonk Wire: Supreme Court takes up Obamacare again.

Administration officials said that “some visitors to Obamacare’s federal enrollment site would experience outages, slow response times or messages to try again later during the month of December,” The Hill reports.

“The administration has staked its healthcare rollout on expanding the system’s user capacity and addressing site errors by the end of the month. Both supporters and opponents of the Affordable Care Act are closely watching the deadline… Both groups know that if the site cannot recover by next month, its dysfunction will plunge the administration into another political crisis.”