This Washington Post article starts bad for the O’Malley administration…

More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.

Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”

…and it never particularly gets any better for them, either. One reads this article with mixed emotions: on the one hand, it describes an unmitigated disaster that ended in screaming, wild accusations, ongoing lawsuits, and quite a lot of pain for quite a lot of innocent people*. On the other hand? I didn’t do it. Heck, I am one of the people who told them that the sites weren’t going to work.

On the gripping hand, this pretty much means that Lt. Governor Anthony Brown’s bid for the gubernatorial nomination is, if not yet dead in the water, at least now holed under the water line**. This would please Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, except of course for the entire underage drunken twerking thing (ain’t Maryland Democratic politics fun?). This is going to be an ugly primary, and I expect that Brown is going to go heavily negative as soon as the last few months start showing up in the polls. Which they will. And this might end up with pot-loving Del. Heather Mizeur eking out the win. I can’t WAIT to see Joe Biden campaign for her.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*And no, it’s not OK because most of them are Democrats.

**Martin O’Malley’s Presidential bid, too, but we were all humoring him on that anyway.