Come, butamong the winners federal workers back to job. Theyre probably sifting through 16 days of emails and phone calls they were forced to miss and Vice President joe biden reopened offices but made no guarantees about the future. Is there any guarantee . Theres no guarantees of anything, but, loorks what you saw last night is democrats with a significant number of responsible republicans say enough. You know, there was no economic ration yale fale for in of this and ted cruz was meeting with veterans. Lets not forget ted cruz is the one who caused the shutdown and voted last night to reopen it. Hes calling it a remarkable vick toy to see the house engaged a profile, encouraging. Luke russert is on the hill. First i want to say, tourie said. Thats a much longer conversation. How long have you lived in buffalo . Since christmas day. Its a blood thing. Its the blood brother. Sure. Its a blood brother kind of thing. This is already getting awkward. There are already some lawmakers that are talking about the next fight which is sadly just around the bend as republican congressman fleming put it to the New York Times. Were going to start this all over again but it does seem that congressional wisdom is lessons have been learned especially when it comes to speaker boehner. I wonder, youve been limbing this day in and day out is. That your sense . Yes. I think if you saw the interview that came out from Mitch Mcconnell telling the hill newspaper, one of the local rags on capitol hill, that he will no longer engage in shutting down the government on obama care, thats bad strategy, coupling that with the dwindling poll numbers, they wont pursue that strategy again, shutting down the government over the funding of the president S Health Care law. What is interesting is in this odd world in which we live in, john boehner, who has been just critiqued from the left, the right, for being a weak leader, has actually now been emboldened by the very conservative members who dragged him into this fight. Michele bachmann saying the speaker showed a lot of resolve in the last three weeks and you have ted cruz saying the House Republicans went into battle showing grit and gut. So its an interesting dynamic at play. What i do think youll see is a bigtime battle over the january 159 deadline in regards to what will the government be fighting cleanly but it wont be a shutdown. Theyll figure something more all encompassing. The budget negotiations are going to be starting for the first time in a long while and the debt limit that occurred in february but they have the extraordinary meshes and that can be moved. I will say this. The president sort of trying to recalibrate this and saying, hey, lets do Immigration Reform, that face as very steep, steep, steep uphill batter with the house of representatives in 2014, which is a midterm year. So as far as them coming together, holding hands, singing kumbaya, thats not going to happen next year. When you have something as toxic and destructive as the last 16 days, they realize thats not the way to go either. One can only hope. Good luck to those bills. Lets turn now to michael sha sharer er. President obama now finds himself actually in a stronger place than a month ago. If you think about where he was a month ago, september, he was reeling from democrats having denied him on his first choice to head the fed and of course the syria debate. Im not one that likes to pick winners and losers but democrats are certainly more unified coming out of the shutdown than theyve been in a while and thats always a good thing for the president , right . It is. The white house in this year and other years hasnt gotten a lot of gifts. Generally world events tend to be against them and theyre coping with them. And this was a gift handed to them with a bow by john boehner a few weeks ago. They see they succeeded in shutting down the government or threatening not to raise the debt ceiling less attractive in the future. And i think the president has reasserted himself in an ironic way because he stayed out of most of these negotiations as sort of the cooler head, which is always the position he like os to be in. Michael, are those new glasses . A couple weeks old. They look good. Weve had you on before without them. Theyre the new normal. I can take them off now if you want. No, no. Save that for the end of the segment. What i want to ask you, though, is i understand this is an incremental breakthrough. This week is better than last week but it seems to me on this issue of the full faith and credit of the united states, this year is much worse than two years ago. The trend line on the big picture is bad. Take a look here. In 2011 you had 26 republicans vote for default. Yesterday 144 republicans voting for default even after everything. So while we can understand that we put out the fire for now, it seems the longterm trend is a lot more republicans on record for default. You know, you can argue that, but its also true that a lot of those voting are symbolic votes. Remember president obama back in the day voted for a default. At that point it was a very symbolic vote. He knew a lot of it was going to pass. A lot those votes fall into that category if a while. Theres some share that believe we should default and it wont be that bad, et cetera. Most of them do it. Just for fun. Just for the heck of it. And as a protest, i think i think coming out of this, youre not going to be i think the president was able to sort of move away from the 2011 narrative was every time we move away from it, its a time to extract concessions. The president was able to move the ball on that. If we do get back to march of next year, whenever the extraordinary measuring run out and the republicans again are threatening to default on the debt. I think republicans are really in a position now where theyre going to take again the brunt of the blame for that. Its not say they wont do it, but its not as politically attractive as it was in 2011. Well see. Michael, as abby mentioned earlier, albeit without suvnt outrage, ted shutdown cruz was out shaking veterans hands as if he was not the one driving the whole shutdown. Is he a performance artist doing a piece about modern conservative or is he perhaps a sleeper agent sent from the Democratic Party to help damage the republican party. Stray, youre going to give it away, geez. We receive this trend for years with Michele Bachmann for others. Theyll create a reality bubble around them to play to a particular audience that wants to hear a particular story. Thats something theyve always done. Politicians often create stories and sells to voters. The problem is that elections end when voters go to decide and usually thats a real reality check. You would think. This situation ended when the polls came out. We know the reality of the situation. We know that what ted cruz is saying is not true, but he has chosen to pretend as if those polls arent real and we dont have to worry about what the American People say. He was saying yesterday the American People rose up and stood behind me and were going to keep fighting this as if the American People were on his side. The American People are actually reality people checking not on his side but for him it doesnt matter because hes playing a different game. Thats what happens when you live in a bubble with fake news and people who would believe that fake news that youre also hearing. Let me point out that toure does not live in a bubble at all. The country is polarized. We have different information streams. We choose our own adventure. All these trends go on. I think hes taking it to a new place. It will be interesting as we get closer to 2014 as we go through it because of gerrymandering, how much they call him on it. Thats going to come back in a real way for the republican party. I have an alternate ted cruz origin theory which is frankenstein theory created by i like that. Youve got great piece over at time right now on thewomen who really shined during that whole crisis. The tight sl appropriately women are the only adults left in washington you point out with the federal government at shutdowns door. Theyre setting new standards for civility. Nancy pelosi was also remarkable repeatedly reaching out to boehner saying im here, im ready to help you out of this bind whenever youre ready. At the end she signaling every Single Member of her party to n the caucus to default. Can we look to the women of washington as sort of a hope to the future . I think we already do. If you look back, almost every piece of major legislation thats come out of the senate has come from a committee of women. Whats distinguished the women from their male counterparts is theyre still part of a society. Part of a social network with each other across party lines. They meet regularly for dinners and the men have stopped doing that. So when it comes to crisis points like this, theyre willing to reach across the aisle, willing to do the horse trading and they have the ability to do that. I think were going to continue to see this shift in that direction. Michael scherer, its always great to have you. As mitt romney told us, he loves women as well. I do love the shades and i would say i think ari could use a pair as well. I dont know what that is. It sounds like a dis but it makes no mistake. He took them off. He took them off. He looks good both ways. I like them. Put them back on. He looks like clark kent. Clark kent, i like that. Up next, a teenager could have done it. What experts are saying that about as the cycle rolls on for a thursday, october 17th. [ male announcer ] eeny, meeny, miny, go. More adventures await in the new sevenpassenger lexus gx. Lease the 2014 gx 460 for 499 a month for 27 months. See your lexus dealer. For 499 a month for 27 months. For sein a whole new way. For seeing what cash is coming in and going out. So you can understand every angle of your cash flow last week, this month, and even next year. For seeing your businesss cash flow like never before, introducing cash flow insight powered by pnc cfo. A suite of online tools that lets you turn insight into action. [ unr ass [ female announcer ] e people like to pretend a flood could never happen to them. And that their Homeowners Insurance protects them. [ thunder crashes ] it doesnt. Stop pretending. Only Flood Insurance covers floods. Visit floodsmart. Gov pretend to learn your risk. Oh, my parents will be here any minute. Canned soup . No way. Mmm this is delicious katie. Its not bad for canned soup, right . Pfft [ laughs ] you nearly had us there. Canned soup. [ laughter ] [ male announcer ] so good, theyll think its homemade. Try campbells homestyle soup. Mm mm good. Were happy to put governing by crisis on the back burner for a few weeks. Healthcare dove the place to sign up for those online exchanges has gotten off to a slow start because of widespread problems with the site. As the days and weeks have passed its gotten even more brutal. Some Technology Experts told usa today the entire site needs to be taken offline and completely overhauled because its using technology from the 1990s. Thats not good. Tom costello is here with what he learned of the websites problems. Tom . Good afternoon. 15,000 people have visited the website. It insists the website is improving. Some people are getting through and signing up but it wont say ho many people have managed to sign up so far. If the obama care website were a parent it would probably be in intensive care by now. More than two weeks after its rollout healthcare. Gov is getting failing grades from supporters. I hope they fire some people that were incharge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. And the white house itself. Despite the glitches that we acknowledge and that absolutely must be fixed, people are getting on and enrolling. The Washington Post has called it a complete train wreck. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says they need to fix the problems and fix them now. At healthcare. Gov where alive can assistance is available now. Not available now. 17 days later they still havent been able to finish the process. As time went by and we realized thad this was taking longer than expected to sign up, you know, the excitement became more like a question mark, but were not giving up. When you see this as a software programmer, what does it say to you . Amateur hour. It looks like it was created by someone who has never delivered software before. A user should never see this. This would this would barely make beta testing. All right . One potential problem, the website demands users input their personal information before they even begin to window shop for insurance, something retail websites like amazon. Com dont do. Programming experts say a lot of work needs to be done. If they dont change management, this project is doomed because weve already seen what the existing management considers ready for shipping, and its not. You know, the allegations are that the administration waited too long to draw up the blue prints for the website. Then had too many contractors involved. Meanwhile many of the states that have built and run their own websites are getting high marks for how theyre running. Colorado and kentucky are getting cited as being good examples. Tom, thanks for that reporting and were going to turn to matt hoeny whos a Senior Writer for wired. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Look. Theres clearly a gap in the policy and execution. How is this thing actually being rolled out regardless of where you are on the policy . It seems from what were learning theres a lot of concerns. Put this in the context for us of other websites. You know, we hear about soft launches, beta testing, at times where some people try a sight before everyone tries it. Should they have done more of that and how bad does this look given your background in reporting . Clearly they have two problems and one is the system. The other as you alluded to is the scale. And its really, really difficult to launch the scale. You know, theyve gotten 15 million unique people that have gone there on the first two weeks. That makes it really difficult. When you see Facebook Roll out a new feature or google or twitter, theyll roll it out to a small subset of people, make sure its working before they get it in front of everybodys eyeballs. As the government is learn wheng you have a problem like that it makes it exponentially worse. At first i thought the problems of americans expectations were too high as jon stewart pointed out. Hi. Lets get one thing straight about this country. We will camp out all night to be the first people to buy a phone or see a movie about shirtless were wolves, but youve got ten minutes to get me thiS Health Care. If it were an eye phone, wed say 17 days is no big deal but when you dig into the numbers, theyre saying 10 million unique visitor, tom costello saying 15. Either way, were looking at about 36,000 completed enrollments, only 1 million completed registrations. These are pathetic numbers. Look. The white house, the administration is working very hard. Ryan lizza from the new yorker who is loving bashing it on twitter said, hairks he just went through health care. Gov and it worked very well and smoothly for him. This is clearly a task that was beyond the folks who were tasked with building it, right . I think i think, you know, the people at least who were administering it, it seems to be beyond their capabilities to do. There were multiple contractors who all had to work together, maybe didnt know what the others were doing and you still have all this information that, you know, when people were putting in this information, its going to a lot of different places. Some of it needs go to dhs to verify that people are actually citizens. Its just got so many pieces that it was you know, it was a really, really hard job to launch this to the entire country, and it seems like they should have had someone with more experience who had done Something Like this at a large scale than they actually put in place. Without a doubt. We have some of the best computer engineers on globe in this country. Why dont you just go to like apple or something, crystal and say, hey, you guys, help us out. We have this major project. Youre going to be down with us. Youre going to get a tax break. Why not goinggo to some people like that and make this website really work i have a little confession to make which im a little embarrassed to admit at this exact moment. I used to work for the main contractor cgi federal. So ive seen this process up close and personal. What happened is i expect cgi had a contract already with hhs, understood the back end of the system already, they had a relationship with the client and there are all these private contracting firms around d. C. That specialize in Government Operations and specialize in how to get these contracts, so a lot of smaller private companies, a lot of the bigger private companies that you heard of arent necessarily specialists in that process of how to navigate the Government Contracting system. I mean, mat, how much of these errors do you think are coming from the governments end of things, providing this requirements too late, not providing enough money, and how much do you think is faulty work on the contractors a pz part and sort of endemic to this whole process of government con tracking . I think youre seeing both. I mean i think certainly some of the problems that are Software Problems are thinks where the contractors messed up or did something wrong. Oracle, i think, has said their systems are working. Everybody said, hey, our stuff works, including hhs. Theyve sort of tried to say its not really our fault. Its the number of people who are visiting it. But they should have been doing more testing before this launched to the whole country to figure this stuff out and figure out where its broken. The bottleneck that you alluded to in your earlier seg meant where they have to sign up before they browse the plans, i believe you can now at least look at plans and get an estimate of what your costs are going to be in youre in a state that doesnt have an exchange. That should ease things up a little bit, but still the problem with actually getting information in the system and then theres also a problem with getting the informa