The recent controversy over HealthCare.gov, the still-glitchy website through which the uninsured are supposed to apply for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, had seemed like a tempest in a teacup. It looked like just another iteration of partisan posturing over a law that is somehow both a fait accompli and an incomprehensible mess.

But a scathing editorial from Bob Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect, made me take notice. Attacking Obama for being “tragically and inexcusably hands-off,” Kuttner concluded that “the debacle reflects both flawed legislation and flawed leadership.”

This editorial is notable because, for one, Kuttner is a left-liberal, usually sympathetic critic of the administration, not a right-wing bandwagoner. Other liberals began to join in. William Galston, a political philosopher who worked in the Clinton administration and now at the Brookings Institute, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Every experienced manager knows that, left to its own devices, the system will not always behave this way . . . So the president must lean against these perverse tendencies . . . [but] it has become clear that President Obama failed to institute such arrangements.”