The website for Obamacare was launched on October 1, 2013.

That was the same day the 2013 Republican-led shutdown of the government began. The sixteen-day shutdown — which was essentially caused by Ted Cruz, who held up the passage of a spending bill because the Democrats wouldn’t agree to defund the Affordable Care Act they had just passed — failed. But one of the reasons the Republicans never paid a price for the shutdown was that it got completely overshadowed by the clusterfuck of the failed launch of the website, which was called Healthcare.gov.

The failure of Healthcare.gov caused no end of tsuris for the entire Obama administration, but especially for Brad Jenkins, who was the associate director of the Office of Public Engagement. Jenkins had lined up an army of celebrities to build support for Obamacare, which always depended, remember, on getting younger people to sign up for health care. But the celebrity industrial complex is only as strong as your website is working.