ObamaCare isn't Obama's Katrina. It's his Iran-contra.

The ramifications of Obama’s lie will continue to haunt him. Republicans can now blame every negative piece of health care news on Obamacare and the president who signed it into law. And there will be plenty of bad news to come: the status of the lost individual plans remains unclear, the website remains broken, there is no guarantee that the administration will meet its enrollment targets, the employer mandate hasn’t gone into effect, and just wait until the first security breaches, privacy violations, and fraudulent subsidies hit the exchanges. By passing Obamacare on a party line vote, Democrats welcomed the politicization of the health care market, or 18 percent of the economy. They’re going to get it.

The Obama Revolution, which came to office with plans to expand dramatically the role of government in our lives and restore America’s reputation abroad, has come to a halt. Obamacare will consume the remainder of the Obama presidency. Administration officials are already making frequent trips to Capitol Hill to provide updates on the website, enrollments, lost plans, new plans, fraudulent plans, illegal subsidies, etc. The president and his team, exhausted by a year that has included the IRS scandal, the Justice Department leak scandal, the NSA scandal, the Syria absurdity, a defeat on gun control, and a deadlocked immigration reform, will devote the bulk of their time to making sure his health care bill actually works (easier said than done) and defending the president’s health care record.

There is always the possibility that Obama recovers from the train wreck. Just a month ago, remember, the collective consciousness of the national media had decided the government shutdown doomed the Republican Party to oblivion. Healthcare.gov may be magically fixed, the site may serve millions of customers at a time, the rest of the Affordable Care Act may be implemented without a hitch, the economy may boom, Hillary may win the presidency in 2016, the memories of polarization and partisanship and incompetence may gradually fade away. Life is full of surprises.

Once the narrative of second-term failure and unpopularity and untrustworthiness sets in, though, it is hard to break.