If you’ve read the book “This Town,” you know this exchange is a cinch to be featured in chapter one of the sequel. Too bad O didn’t let her ask her follow-up question: “What’s your back-up New Year’s resolution?”

How bad was it? Here’s what CNN came up with by way of a newsy takeaway after sifting through the wreckage:

Even that’s a lie, of course. This was unquestionably the worst year of his presidency. The only one that compares is 2010, the year he and Pelosi got wiped out in the midterms. But 2010 was also the year they passed ObamaCare, his great legacy-building … uh, accomplishment.

Actually, yeah, maybe 2010 was worse.

He got a couple of good questions about the NSA that elicited a promise to address the subject more thoroughly next month but it took a good hour for someone in the room to get around to asking him why the Democratic dreamscape that is O-Care lately requires tectonic “fixes” every 36 hours or so. That was Chuck Todd, who tweeted this tidbit just before the presser started:

HHS has clarified: if u got a cancellation notice, bought insurance but thot price was too high, u can cancel and now sign up for bare bones

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) December 20, 2013

I thought they were waiving the mandate and opening up catastrophic coverage to people whose plans were canceled purely as a stopgap for those who hadn’t yet enrolled on the exchanges and were terrified at suffering a lapse in coverage on New Year’s. That would, at least, minimize the adverse selection problem from all of this. The whole point of having people canceled in the first place was to force the healthy into more expensive O-Care plans so that they can subsidize coverage for the sick. If you’re going to let some portion of that group revert to dirt-cheap catastrophic coverage, obviously you want to keep that portion as small as possible. If you let ’em all go, then the healthy will bail out for less expensive coverage and suddenly the exchange risk pool is full of people with expensive preexisting conditions and no one else. But nope, that’s not how they’re playing this. Even if you’ve already enrolled in an O-Care exchange plan, you can dump it and pick up less expensive catastrophic insurance now. I guess they had no choice but to level the playing field — this was, of course, a political decision, not a policy one — but it underscores Todd’s question to O at the presser: If pre-ObamaCare plans were so “junky,” why let people back on them now?

I’ll leave you with this, the only question I really wanted an answer to today:

“Do you remember the moment you realized you had the power to change the law at will?”

— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) December 20, 2013