A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that only 41% approve of President Obama’s handling of the health care law’s implementation, versus 53% who disapprove.”

“But even despite this, only one third of Americans support repealing the law. A sizable bloc of those who oppose the law want it to continue, anyway.”

Brad Phillips: “The words ‘Edsel,’ ‘Buckner,’ and ‘Ishtar’ stand as single-word reminders of spectacular failures. The question now facing the Obama administration is whether the term ‘Obamacare’ will join their ranks — not in reference to the policy itself, but rather to its botched rollout…” 

President Obama acknowledged his frustration “with the technical problems that have hampered the online health-insurance marketplaces, but pledged that the issues would be resolved and the Affordable Care Act would prove successful,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Said Obama: “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed… There’s no sugarcoating it.”

But the Washington Post notes Obama also admonished Republican critics saying that “it is time to stop rooting for the law’s failure.”

Wonk Wire: Obamacare exchanges were destined for failure

First Read: “In remarks on the health-care law from the White House at 11:25 am ET, the president will acknowledge the problems with the website and will discuss the efforts to fix it, per NBC’s Kristen Welker. He also will note the other ways uninsured Americans can apply for health-care coverage on the exchanges — through call centers or paper application. But here’s why this problem is potentially more than just a glitch: The law doesn’t work if not enough people, especially healthy young adults, are signing up for coverage.”

“The extra challenge for the White House is that they touted to reporters (both publicly and privately) how the website would work and that it would work as well as Apple, and now many of these same reporters feel burned or even lied to. And, of course, none of this should have been a surprise for Team Obama. It knew that Republicans were ready to pounce on any deficiency, real or imagined. Well, these problems are real.”

Time: “While Obama could probably continue to tell Americans that the Obamacare rollout is little more than an iPhone app in need of an update, his health care law actually needs uninsured people to choose to sign up or it will fail. And so the spin can no longer stand.”

Wonk Wire: Repairing Obamacare exchanges could take weeks.

“Not remotely, because the people I work for are the women and men and men you just saw. I work for 26 million Texans. That’s my job to fight for them. I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas and I fight for them.”

— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in an interview on CNN, saying he’s not bothered by the anger from his Republican colleagues over his strategy to defund Obamacare.

Jeb Bush told ABC News that the Republican Party should stop trying to repeal Obamacare and just the law undermine itself.

Said Bush: “So have a little bit of self-restraint. It might actually be a politically better approach to see the massive dysfunction. But we don’t even hear about that, because we stepped on that message.”

Having lost the battle to defund President Obama’s health care law, “conservative activists are pursuing a hardball campaign as they chart an alternative path to undoing Obamacare — through the states,” the New York Times reports.

“The state-by-state strategy represents a split from the course pursued by Heritage Action for America and its sister organization, Heritage Foundation, which drove the ‘defunding Obamacare’ movement that led to the recent government shutdown.”

Writes Heritage president Jim DeMint in the Wall Street Journal: “Obamacare will now be the issue for the next few years.”

The Wall Street Journal looks at HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her role in the rocky Obamacare rollout.

“As the chief advocate for the Affordable Care Act, Secretary Sebelius is scrambling behind the scenes to address the website’s technical failures. With anger growing over the inability of consumers across the U.S. to access the new online marketplace, Mrs. Sebelius has become the target of late-night spoofs and calls for her resignation.”

Said Sebelius: “It’s tough to take these shots. But I will take them until we get this right.”

Wonk Wire: At least one health insurance exchange is working

This Huffington Post quiz is harder than you might think.

A new Democracy Corps (D) poll finds just 38% now clearly oppose the Affordable Care Act.

“While likely voters divide evenly on the plan, 8% oppose the law because it does not go far enough. As a result, just 38% oppose the law because it is big government.”

Another key finding: By 58% to 38%, voters say lawmakers should implement and fix the law rather than repeal it.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “met with roughly 15 to 20 House Republicans for around two hours late Monday night at the Capitol Hill watering hole Tortilla Coast,” Roll Call reports.

“The group appeared to be talking strategy about how they should respond to a tentative Senate deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling without addressing Obamacare in a substantive way, according to sources who witnessed the gathering… The group is a collection of members who have often given leadership headaches in recent years by opposing both compromise measures as well as packages crafted by fellow Republicans. And, it seems, leadership unwittingly became aware of the meetup.”

The Week: Will the House sink a bipartisan Senate deal on the debt ceiling?

Ezra Klein on the Obamacare exchanges: “We’re a couple of weeks in and people can’t sign up, people have tried 20, 30, 40 times. It’s one thing for that to be true the first three or four days, it’s another thing for it to be true two or three weeks in… One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well. On that, so far, this has been a big failure.”

Wonk Wire: Redesign of healthcare.gov appears likely.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KY) called on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebeliu to resign for “gross incompetence” in the wake of flawed healthcare exchanges and enrollment technology, Politico reports.

Said Roberts: “How long do we let this failed exchange continue to operate? From the very beginning of the bill’s passage, I have said this cannot work. This week, Sebelius continued wasting taxpayer dollars on advertising and promotional tours. This included failed rallies at NFL stadiums and appearances on comedy shows to promote enrollment while at the same time, Americans were unable to sign up for health care plans as promised. Even Jon Stewart didn’t think it was a laughing matter.”

The Fix: “By virtually any measure, the rollout of the health-care exchanges — a central element of the Affordable Care Act — has been a disaster… That’s front page/top of broadcast sort of news. And it’s all bad for President Obama. Except that the federal government is shut down, a story so big that it has sucked up all the media oxygen that under virtually any other circumstances would be spent on the problems with a centerpiece of Obamacare. And that is Republicans’ single biggest strategic misstep of this entire shutdown — and the one that may haunt them for months to come.”

“As we have written before, health care is a stone-cold winner — if polling is accurate — for Republicans in the midterm elections unless they screw it up, which they are in the process of doing.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought his pollster to a closed-door GOP lunch to convince members the shutdown was helping the Republican party, David Drucker reports.

“The survey’s findings mirrored other national polls: More voters blame the Republicans for the government shutdown than blame President Obama or the Democrats. But Cruz argued, based on the poll, that Republicans are in a much better position than they were during the 1995 shutdown because this impasse is defined by a disagreement over funding for the Affordable Care Act as opposed to a general disagreement over government spending.”

A new Brigham Young University poll in Utah finds 51% of Utah voters now disapprove of the performance of Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

“The survey also finds that 57% of Utahns want Lee, whose crusade against funding Obamacare helped bring about a budget impasse and the shutdown of the federal government, to be more conciliatory and compromise on a budget, even if it means funding President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.”

John Podhoretz: “If ObamaCare had been as unpopular as conservatives believed, their plan for the shutdown — that there would be a public uprising to force Democratic senators in close races in 2014 to defund it — would’ve worked. It didn’t. Not a single senator budged.”

“Their tactic failed, and now what they are left with is House Speaker John Boehner basically begging the president of the United States to negotiate with him.”

“One thing we know for sure is that it’s not an equal fight, this fight between a man who received 65 million votes nationwide and a man who received 246,000 votes in one congressional district in Ohio.”

First Read: “If you’re a Democrat and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you have a problem. And that’s exactly what happened when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius went on the Daily Show last night to talk about the glitches with the Obamacare website.”

Wonk Wire: No Obamacare enrollment numbers until November.

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